


Diablerie

by orphan_account



Series: "Having fun with blood" and 1,000 other things to do when you're mad [1]
Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Blood, Bodily Fluids, Body Horror, Disgustingness, Feeding, Gen, Graphic descriptions of a corpse, Like wow this is gross watch out kids, Mind Control, Necrophilia, Starvation, Vague DubCon, fabricated memories, mind wipe, so much blood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:10:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 35,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3962215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A malkavian fledgling who has forgotten her name is sent to wipe out the Sabbat at the Hollowbrook hotel, but in learning more about them, she discovers a fascinating part of vampiric lore; diablerie. An idea plants itself in her mind, an idea she can't shake.<br/><em>"The sunshine was molten gold, running down his back, spilling over his hair. It was so hot that day. Not record-breaking, but still scorching, and beads of sweat dripped from his nose. But he felt good.</em><br/><em>He felt happy, knowing he could help her. It was the least he could do."</em></p><p>This (too long) fic is discontinued.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Andrei

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank himegirl15 for drawing fanart of this fic! It can be found here: https://www.deviantart.com/art/Sunny-the-gerudo-for-Embranumb-695751684  
> 

The Jester spoke like a king. Commanding people, commanding things, commanding deaths.  
It made her head spin. She supposed that’s why she wasn’t in charge. She only listened with half an ear anyway; LaCroix wasn’t intelligent enough to decipher when her rambling responses meant something, and when they didn’t.  
“Have I made myself clear?” He suddenly asked, catching her off guard. She had expected his speech to last longer.  
“Look, for I am the Jester, and I say this! “Neonyte, eradicate the wretched Sabbat in my name!”” she replied, doing a pretty spot on LaCroix impression. That meant yes. Then he continued talking, and she continued not listening, instead busying herself by staring at the Sheriff.  
He was a very big, very cool dude. She studied his jawline until her blonde boss demanded a reply once again, and this time she didn’t have a clue what he had asked.  
“Uh… No?”  
“As expected. Diablerie is the source of much of the Sabbat’s power. It is when a vampire drains another, more powerful vampire, until death. The living vampire then gains the powers of the deceased. Under the Camarilla, such an act is punishable by execution.”  
His words lodged themselves deep in her brain, where they started pulsing. Feeding off another kindred, like some sort of deluxe juicebox? He must have taken her disbelieving stare to mean she understood him now, and sent her off, the one time she actually had any follow-up questions.

As she stepped out into the rain and started dragging her feet to the Hollowbrook hotel, where she was sure the Sabbat would meet their end, she couldn’t shake those words out of her head. Diablerie was such an interesting concept. You had to be mad to even think about it.  
She giggled to herself. If madness was a qualification, she certainly got the job.  
The Hollowbrook hotel was locked from the outside, with fogged windows and a convenient lack of a doorbell. Like a shadow she prowled around the building, one hand to the cold, wet brick. There was a back door, barricaded from the inside, and a lift meant for transporting building materials to the top.  
“I am not a plank of wood,” She told herself as she took it to the roof.  
“I’m not.”

Some of the Sabbat were human. She ate them up, fueling her disciplines. The others glowed, and some glowed a lot, but her favorites were blinded men just standing there. Scattered about there were men with no eyes, blood dripping from their noses, swaying in an invisible breeze. They tasted as bland as water. In fact, as long as she took it a little slow, she did not even come close to losing.  
The Sabbat were frenzied and desperate, howling and screaming and scratching at everything. It didn’t take much effort to disembowel them if you knew how.

The last door she entered didn’t lead into another hallway. It lead into a tunnel carved in the ground, and she went down, down, down, until passing through the gates of hell and into Andrei’s arms.  
The first time they had met, he had asked if she was shocked by his appearance. She had been. Now she felt like she could stare at his crown forever. She liked his lips, his bright eyes, his dark-grey skin and soft accent. He complimented the smell of her blood (at least she thought it was a compliment), and she spoke to him as long as she could.  
They both knew this would end in a fight, and only one would survive.  
His den was covered in blood. There was pools of thick, fresh blood on the ground, and a walkway of soil running through it. The walls were covered in a crust of coagulation, with the unfortunate donors emboweled on the walls. A decoration only Tzimisce could appreciate. The smell should have appealed to her, but it was all dead. Dead blood held no flavor, no life, rendering itself useless.  
His words ended and their eyes locked. This was her clue.  
She sentenced the false prophet to die, pointing at her with her weed-whacker-made-weapon, and he fell into the pool of blood, only to reappear as a grotesque parody of himself on the other side of the room.  
The voices in her head whispered to her when she subconsciously asked them what was going on.  
“It’s his waerform,” they said, just as Andrei landed in front of her. She had no time to study him before firing off her favorite discipline, Vision of Death, and swinging the weed whacker at him.  
It didn’t even seem to affect him. A giant claw hit her head and sent her brain against her skull, knocking her to the ground just late enough to see Andrei jump into a pool again.  
“Get up,” The voices whispered.  
“If you fall in the blood, you die.”  
She was not going to die.  
Her brain was singing with pain as she scrambled to her feet and ran to a corner of the room, as far away from the blood as she could. When she turned around he was there, running at her, and another Vision of Death prompted him to submerge again.  
She had no blood packs on her, and no firearms. Her disciplines were the only ranged attack she could use, and they needed blood to work. She had maybe two or three uses left before she would have to feed to function, and there was nowhere she could-  
Her eyes drifted across the room, the ground shaking as Andrei emerged and landed his heavy form on the makeshift floor. She couldn’t feed off him, obviously. He was very big, very strong, and it was very illegal. But, what she could do…  
She ran straight at him, surprising him enough to let her fire her last Vision of Death at him and make him submerge. Her way now clear of obstacles, she had access to the only victim hung on the walls that was not hanging above a pool of blood. He was crucified, his stomach opened and the flaps of flesh pinned to the wall behind him, exposing his ribs and eternal organs. He had been drained, and his blood was collected in a trough beneath him. It smelled fresher than anything else in this room.  
She knelt by it like a faithful for prayer, and felt the soil beneath her dirty knees shake as Andrei landed on the other side of the room, having misjudged where she was. He came towards her like a raging bull when she dipped her head in the disgusting, red concoction, and actually stopped to look at her when she drank.  
It was horrible. She regretted everything she had ever done up to that point. The taste and the effect it had on her insides was proof that no merciful god existed, because no god with a conscience would ever allow such a vile thing to enter her body.  
When she shakily stood up and turned around, it looked like she was wearing a scarlet cowl, slowly dripping down her arms, chest and back. Five steps in front of her was Andrei in his waerform. This was the first time he had stood still, and she could study his horrifying, twisted face for a bit. He looked like a giant gargoyle, if said gargoyle had been forced through a blender first.  
But it had done the trick. When she used her Vision of Death discipline on him once more, it had some additional, corrupted element in it, presumably because of the horrible blood she used to fuel it. It knocked Andrei off his feet and into the blood on his right, and hurt him so much that when he jumped back he had been forced back into his less powerful, more handsome form.  
The corrupted blood was having strange effects on her vision. Everything was tinted purple and black, like the air itself had a bruise, and her feet were too fast for her to keep up with as she sprinted towards the Tzimisce and threw herself on top of him, no thought for tactics or logic. They wrestled, and she felt his powers crackle in his hands when she managed to grab his wrists.  
There was something wrong. She felt it in the back of her head. The voices told her what she had almost figured out.  
“He is stronger than you,” they hissed. “He isn’t fighting as much as he could. He wants you to win. He wants to see what you’re going to do.”  
She stared into his eyes and knew the voices to be right. He had no fear of death, only a clinical, scientific interest in how it worked. He had the same interest in her, the fledgling Malkavian who had bested him once.  
Her knees were on his thighs, her hands on his wrists, their noses almost touching. She wanted him to like her before she died. For some reason she wanted his respect, she wanted to impress him. After all, he was a very powerful vampire, and…  
Powerful vampire.  
The words echoed in her head, and somewhere in the depths of her shattered psyche, a sentence emerged. A sentence that would change her unlife.  
_“Diablerie is the source of much of the Sabbat’s power. It is when a vampire drains another, more powerful vampire, until death.”_  
Andrei could see the cogwheels in her brain find their place, but he still gasped as she bit into his neck, as swift and powerful as a shark.  
She didn’t feed on him like she fed on kine; he deserved better. Instead she took a chunk of flesh out of his neck and drank as she blood flowed freely.  
He crunched under her teeth. Flesh isn’t supposed to do that.  
And his blood burned her tongue, it burned her throat, and as it settled in her stomach it burned away any remnant of the corrupted blood she had drank earlier. He didn’t struggle to stop her.  
His superhuman body tried to repair itself, tried to produce blood faster than she was draining it, and soon she thought she was going to explode if she didn’t stop. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She buried her fingers in his flesh and kept going, spilling his vitae all over her but devouring most of it, until finally his muscles lost their tension.


	2. Freedom

She stayed down there, in Andrei’s bloody lair, looking at nothing and feeling her new brain settle.  
Everything was different.  
The air smelled different. The world looked different. Her blood pounding in her ears sounded different, the tinge of metal tasted different in the back of her throat and the damp soil beneath her feet felt different. Everything was crisp, clear, and yet she had never been so confused.  
She stayed in the den so long that LaCroix grew worried and sent someone after her. Like a bloated snake she had to stay still for days while digesting her latest meal, but of course the high-and-mighty Ventrue prince had no sympathy.  
He had sent Beckett. Probably because Beckett was already in his apartment, studying that dirty old sarcophagus, and because he was afraid of sending his Sheriff in case anyone decided to call him out on his bullshit. She was pleasantly surprised that she could smell the werewolf a mile away, singling out his scent the second he entered the building. She could even smell him above the rancid blood.  
A new voice entered her head. That wasn’t new; new voices appeared all the time, but they disappeared just as quick. Some screamed, some whispered, some coerced and some warned. This one commanded.  
“Barricade the door. If he finds you like this, you will be killed.”  
It took some work to get off the floor, but her motivation increased as she could smell Beckett coming closer. Her hunt for a crate or something proved fruitless, so she just slumped against the door and made herself into a very lazy barricade.  
“He can’t smell you. You’re covered in blood. He can smell the blood, and he will try to get in.”  
This voice was smart, she thought. She hoped it stayed a while to help her, because she felt very full and very confused and generally useless right now.  
Beckett was right outside the corridor now. Any moment he would try to open the door, and then he would bash it in. If he found her covered in blood, surrounded by dead Kine and literal pools of blood, the smell of Tzimisce on her breath…  
She shuddered to think about it.  
He reached the door. She said a silent prayer.  
He shook the handle.   
He pushed the door, pushing her a little forward.  
And then, to her surprise, he called out. It was her name, but she took a while to recognize it, and it stirred no feelings within her.  
It was as if the blood of Andrei had scorched away the last of her humanity. Her mortal memories and mortal name were ashes now, and they meant nothing.  
_“Pretend it’s you,”_ the intelligent voice said again, ringing between her ears.  
_“Pretend it’s your name. Answer.”_  
She cleared her throat and coughed to remove some gunk that had lodged itself in her now useless windpipe, and answered hoarsely.  
“Y-yeah?”  
“Are you blocking the door?” Beckett asked, relieved that she was alive by the sound of it.  
A brilliant idea struck her, and by sliding down the door and reaching with her foot she managed to retrieve her weapon, laying halfway submerged just out of her reach.  
“I am your unfortunate blockade!” She sang, speaking loudly to camouflage the sound of the rusty weed whacker going across soil.  
“Let me in, fledgling.”  
He pushed the door again, and she pulled her weapon towards her. She said a silent prayer to any god that would listen and slowly started to carve into her own flesh, trying not to let her voice betray her pain.  
“My body is stone, Wolf. I am immobile for now. Break the door down without breaking me, and I will let you carry me in your strong, hairy arms back to the tower!”  
She giggled. The pain was horrifying. She really, really hoped the vile smell of blood and flesh in the room was enough to conceal the fact that she was freshly bleeding. Her idea was for Beckett to find her deadly wounded, and then explain that she had fought Andrei and killed him, but her wounds had left her unable to move.  
She would have to find and explanation for her wounds not healing in the days she had been gone, but those worries were for later days.  
Beckett was showing his excellent logical skills on the other side of the door by making a hole in the middle and pulling it off its hinges, towards him and away from her, making her fall backwards. She glanced quickly down her body and was relieved to find her belly no longer looked like a bloated balloon. Then she looked up and faced Beckett, who quickly took her up on her offer by picking her up and starting to carry her.  
The weapon she had used to mutilate herself came with her, it had been stuck through her shoulder in a stroke of brilliance, and she found that the deep flesh wounds all over her front looked quite convincing. She was bleeding all over, and a perverse part of her was hoping Beckett wouldn’t have time to wash his coat in some time, just so her scent would stick with him.  
He was fast. In the cover of night he smuggled her bleeding, broken self into the tower, and did his best not to let her bleed all over the elevator when they got to that part.  
She could hear him mumbling. It concerned her.  
“Should be healed,” he said, speaking softly. “Should stop bleeding. Why…? Who…?”

When they reached LaCroix, his first worry was the masquerade.  
“You left a trail of blood leading right to me! Are you mad?”  
The question made her laugh so hard she noticed there was a rock or something in-between her fourth and fifth rib. Beckett had been considerate enough to pull up a chair for her, where she was slowly slumping further and further down, her neck now resting on the back of the chair. The wolf took the liberty of lifting her up to let her sit straight again.  
It was the strangest thing. As the lazy haze that had been her world slowly dissipated, it left an oddly clear world, like when you breathe on your glasses and polish them.  
She could pick out exactly 16 different shades of blue in the prince’s eyes, and count all the teeny tiny scars in his Sherriff’s hands. She could smell everyone in the room in addition to the sweat-and-pastry smell of the security guard downstairs.  
Using nothing but her new sense of smell she could identify and place every soul in the building and a mile around, and somehow all these impressions did not become too much.  
Her brain was made for this. It felt only right.  
She noticed that she had closed her eyes, finding no need for them right now, and the Prince had promptly stopped speaking because of it. She let herself slowly slide from the chair and onto the floor, where she promptly continued bleeding, dying the expensive rug in all sorts of pretty colors.  
It hadn’t occurred to any of the people around her that she could bleed to death.

She woke up a second later, embraced by a powerful musk she didn’t recognize, and held by a set of gigantic arms. She placed the smell to be the Sheriff, and with her incredible senses, she could gather a million facts about her situation without opening her eyes, in the split second it took.  
She was in a dark room, alone with the Sheriff, and he was carrying her. The sound of his steps told her it was a stone floor, possibly marble, meaning they were still in the tower. The stale air told her no one had been in here for a while, and the recognizable scent of dust reaffirmed it.  
Her wounds were healing at incredible speed. She could feel the Sherriff stare at her when he put her own on a cold, hard surface, and she could feel the edges of her flesh growing together seamlessly.  
No more bleeding, no more hurt. The voice in her head that had been so kind as to help her this far spoke again, but it seemed afraid now.  
_“You didn’t heal because you didn’t want to. You can control it. When you fell unconscious, your body took over. You have instantly healed right in front of the eyes of the Sherriff. He knows something is wrong. He knows you are powerful.”_  
And it was true, what the voice said. She was powerful. She was hyper-aware, fast-healing, and probably more if she decided to find out. All thanks to Andrei’s blood, the last drops of which was still settling in her belly and being absorbed into her body.  
She opened her eyes and stared straight and the gigantic man that was LaCroix’s most trusted. He stared back.  
Maybe he couldn’t speak? Was that it? Would he tell on her, even if he could?  
He knew. She knew he knew. There was no way he didn’t know.  
And yet, he just turned and left the way they came, leaving her alone in the apartment’s unused guest bedroom.

She was shaking with fear and pleasure, delighting in the noises she could hear and the sights she could see. She spent an entire hour admiring the chandelier that broke light into particles using shiny glass gems , and then she spent another hour with her eyes closed, listening to the security guard downstairs open and eat a box of donuts, then another.  
Slowly, in the back of her brain, she could feel the hunger creep in. The unique hunger a vampire feels when they neglect feeding for days. Andrei had filled her up nice and good, but it was the blood of mortals she _really_ craved.  
It got worse when she thought about it. It was filling her bones now, threatening to break her, and she longed for the den beneath Hollowbrook hotel, brimming with blood and bowels. She thought of it with delight now, not at all so disgusted that she had been, and she thought herself a fool for not appreciating dipping her entire head in blood when she had the chance.  
Fantasizing about the crucified man whose vitae had been collected in the trough brought her the closest thing to sexual gratification that she had felt since her embrace. It didn’t strike her that this was bad.

She stayed still for a long, long time, fearing that movement would worsen her hunger, until she couldn’t take it any more. She rose from the bedroom floor like a true undead, disabled the alarm on the window, lockpicked it, and snuck out. She had always been a great lockpicker, but now she was insanely so.  
The wind of Los Angeles hit her in the face and whipped her hair around. She stared downwards, dizzy from the height of the top floor, before creeping down the outside of the building like a bloodthirsty cockroach.  
Behind her, the Sherriff entered, looked around the room to confirm his suspicion, and left.

She was free. And the city of angels was her prey now.


	3. E-mail from an unknown sender

(Subject) My morphine man

(From)    The Nameless

 

_Dear Fleetfoot!_

_Your juices covered your couch and I said, "Hello!", I said! And you groaned in my general direction so I drugged you and stole explosives!_  
_Good times, great times, it's time._  
_The Anarchists are riled up, eyes fixed on the prize, unable to see the generations of pitfalls laid by the Camarilla.  
_ _The Camarilla are backing into the wall, and then through it, crushing themselves to live. Brick walls cannot sustain life!_

_Fools, all of them. Fool rhymes with ghoul. Prove me wrong._

_Tell the small child pretending to be a big boy that you will come for me, then come for me. I hang with the Lady of the Sea. There is a machine that claims to share my gift of insight for a measly dollar, but it LIES! Fight it! Fight the machine, and I will come for you._

_So long, sweet god. May your toes be as swift as they ever were._


	4. Mercury

The ocean air of Santa Monica didn’t smell right. It was sharper and saltier than the beach winds anywhere else, and most people thought their noses got kinda clogged after a while. Usually it smelled like popcorn and puke from the carnival nearby, but it was closed now because of a grizzly murder on the pier.  
That is where the Fleet-footed God found himself.

Mercurio had been sent by a furious LaCroix to find the fledgling Malkavian. She had helped him out when he got his ass beat by chemists, and had not even told LaCroix about his fuckup, which was a lifesaver in several ways. He remembered her as a loony, sure, but nothing like what his boss had told him.  
She had apparently single-handedly slaughtered an entire building’s worth of vampires with a modified weed whacker, and then eaten the head-honcho of the bunch. Mercurio had not even heard of diablerie before Sebastian told him.

The reason that Mercurio, of all people, had been sent to track her down was actually not Sebastian LaCroix’s choice. It was the Malkavians choice. She had sent him an e-mail from some internet cafè in Hollywood, stating that she would meet with him and him only, for whatever reasons she could have. Her writing in the e-mail hadn’t exactly been cryptic. “Hanging with the Lady of the Sea” was obviously Santa Monica. There was a reference to “A machine that claims to share my gift of insight for a measly dollar”, and he figured it was that broken-down thing in the carnival that claimed to tell your future.  
The last clue, and the most confusing one, was “but it LIES! Fight it!”. Exactly how was he supposed to fight a box that took money in exchange for a fortune-cookie paper?

He trudged through the large, concrete garage. It smelled like piss and pollution. Many would consider his attire outdated, with the purple jacket and popper-collar suit shirt, but this was what young men dressed like back when he became a ghoul. He saw guys his age with the same style, but they were all greying and sweating and generally unpleasant to look at, refusing to acknowledge their age.  
He was almost 60. But he didn’t feel like _they_ looked.  
Whatever.

He tried not to dwell on his slow aging. Instead he dwelled on the Santa Monica beach, where the lowlifes of vampire society were currently huddled around a rusty barrel on fire. None of them looked at him. He didn’t mind thinbloods, he had no concept of what they meant or why they were there, but he knew his boss hated them. If anyone asked, he hadn’t seen them.  
The clangs of the metal stairs leading to the carnival sounded empty in the night air. It was unnerving how quiet it was here, away from the eyes and the winds of Santa Monica, leaving him alone with the creaking of unused amusement equipment.  
There were eyes in the shadows, he was sure of it. Something was watching him make his way to the big, ugly machine in the middle of the carnival.  
He was surprised to find a boxing glove taped to it.  
There were someone there, they weren’t fooling him. The glove had been attached to the box with a lot of duct tape, and after having to use his trusty pocket knife to get it all off, he was surprised to find note inside it.  
_“A red glove to protect your milky paws from going red for real! Free me!”_  
This chick was mad.

He wondered if he should go back and get a glass cutter or something, because she clearly wanted him to break into the box. It was an old, painted and re-painted kinda thing, with a fake genie inside looking out of the glass like a stripper in a booth. He even had the red light on him.  
Underneath the bust of the genie there was a box talking about how amazing he was, and a little slot to waste your money. For fun, Mercurio did just that.  
The genie howled like a mechanical banshee for a full minute, scaring the shit out of him, before it produced a small paper strip. It was blank.  
“Oh, so that’s my future, eh?” he mumbled, dropping the note.  
“Really polite. Thanks a lot.”  
Then he put the glove on and smashed the glass.

The second the glass was broken, his nose was assaulted. He doubled over when a stench unlike anything he had ever smelled erupted from the glass box, making him dizzy with disgust. He stared into the pavement for a while, afraid to look twice at the fake genie in the machine, because when it had been hidden behind the filthy glass it had looked okay, but it didn’t smell okay.

There was a silent giggle behind him. She was watching him, he knew it, and whatever surprise waited for him inside that fucking carnival machine, it was hers and she had placed it.  
“Just-“ he began a sentence, but nausea pushed in his throat.  
“Just show yourself, aight?”  
He had called down, into the wooden pier.  
“Are you afraid?” a voice answered, so soft he couldn’t be sure he had ever heard it.  
“I’m not gonna look! Just- I did what you said, aight? I came here, I told LaCroix, I fought the thing… Cut me some slack!”  
He stayed down, not daring to look up. She was there now. He could feel her like electricity in the air.

The gentlest touch he had ever felt caressed his neck, and in a fleeting moment, he felt safe. The tinge in the air was less disgusting now, and sweeter, like freshly baked bread. A summer memory of cutting the grass under his grandmothers kitchen window fluttered into his mind, bringing with it the scent of dew and sun and food.  
“Stand, Mercury,” his new master whispered, and he obeyed. His mind was mush. He belonged to her, and to the vivid memory she had trapped him in.  
She led him with the hand of a mother, turning him against the broken glass box. He saw his own face in the shards still left around the frame. There was a different face between them.  
There was no genie, and there had never been. The decapitated head of some unfortunate soul was propped in the middle of the machine, explaining why it didn’t work properly, and it had been there for a long while, explaining why it smelled like shit. The forehead of the victim was completely decomposed, showing bone. Had Mercurio been a detective he would have deduced that the big slashes across the face was from some animal, and that it had been decomposing for a good week.  
But Mercurio was not a detective. He was currently brainwashed and controlled by a vampire, which seriously affected his investigation skills.  
“Kiss it,” the Malkavian whispered. He wanted nothing more.

She left him on his knees, throwing up everything he had ever eaten and cursing her in every language he knew. It was far from impressive, but he put a lot of soul into it.  
She laughed, burying her fingers in the sand as she sprinted across Santa Monica beach. After devouring Andrei it felt more right to run on all fours.  
The Beast inside her was purring with content. She had left a note with the Fleet-footed God, confident he would bring it to his Prince, and whenever Mercurio visited the beach, he would think of her.


	5. A nonsensical note

_For my camarilla compadre!_

_Your ghoulish servant was an absolute delight. Following your example, I'm sure. Consider this an official endorsement of him; he's cute and cuddly and covered in puke!_

_You, my feisty, french friend, is a mess of ALL the proportions! I had pledged my somewhat doubtful allegiance to the Anarchists, had they not shown the same ruthless incompetence as you. The Kuei-Jin are gross._   
_Therefore, I have decided to start a new faction! So far I have only persuaded a small child and a broken tooth to join, but they are highly skilled in the art of seduction, and will bring in more men. I am sure of it._   
_We have no name and no agenda. We just want to kill things and eat them._

_Speaking of eat! I don't know how you figured it out, but I ate the Sabbat. All of them. Except not all of them, just the big boss, but whatever. He is in my tummy and he's having a great time. Such a great time, in fact, that I have decided to be courteous enough to invite you to join him, along with Nines Rodriguez and Ming Xiao. After devouring all of you, I will make an attempt on your Sheriff. I have fantasized about stomaching a man his size for some while now._

_Ok, I said we didn't have an agenda. I lied!_

_Kiss kiss, tell Beckett I said hi,_   
_Yours truly_   
_Me_

 

(Note includes a blue crayon drawing of a large man with hearts around him, wielding a big blade.)   
  



	6. The world was made of gemstones

LaCroix held the note in his pale hands, eyes flicking over the words again, and again, and again.  
In front of him, slumped in the uncomfortable chair, was Mercurio. His head was throbbing.  
“What is this supposed to even mean?!” the frustrated prince said, slamming down the note, just to pick it up again. It was crumpled lined paper, a shopping list on the other side. She must have picked it out of the garbage, he figured.  
“I don't know more than you, boss.”  
Mercurio's voice was showing his age. He had walked on shaky legs back from the beach with throw-up down his front, but he knew he couldn't go home to clean up. He had to come straight here; she had commanded it.  
The doorman had been reluctant to let him up. He couldn't blame the guy. He looked like he felt, which was absolute shit, and it felt like her mind-tricks had some permanent effect on him. If he came close to slipping into sleep (which his exhausted body was begging him to do), he could smell the smells of the memory she had trapped him in.  
 _Freshly cut grass. His grandmother's lavender perfume. Sweat on his brown and down his bare back as he pushed the rusty lawnmower in front of him. Don't you wanna come in for a glass of lemonade, dear?_  
His boss' sharp voice brought him back.  
“Did you see her?”  
“No, boss.” They had been over this before.  
“You must have!” The vampire insisted. “She was right there! You let her get away!”  
When he tried to focus, tried to remember her voice or her touch or even her face, the memory echoed inside him. Dew shines on the green ground. Tiny diamonds, sprinkling emerald shards.  
“N-no, I... I told you, she worked some mumbo-jumbo on me. I didn't see her.”  
“We will go over this from the beginning again, Mercurio. And you will tell me everything.”

 _You've been such a great help, dear. After your grandfather passed, I just can't seem to handle the lawn... Her old laughter was frail and sad. He put an arm around her shoulders. She was so small, smaller than he remembered. Her bony hands found his._  
“I went to the carnival. You know, next to the beach.”

 _She had her pearls on to show a brave face, but he knew her house was a mess. He didn't comment. Didn't question. It must be hard, losing someone you spent over 50 years with._  
“Why the carnival?”  
“Her e-mail mentioned that old fortune-teller booth. It just takes money from tourists and gives you a little paper. I figured that's where she would be.”

 _The world was made of gemstones. The ice in his tea looked like square topazes, the glass like crystal._  
“She left me a boxing glove. I smashed the booth, thinking she left something inside.”  
“And did she?” The anxious prince said. His voice brought him a little back to reality, but not enough. He was slipping, swirling, into the memory she gave him. It was so vivid.  
“Yeah. It was a severed head.”

 _He had kicked the mower to get it back on. It was spitting and hissing like an angry cat, but it went. She couldn't afford a new one, so he didn't complain. Maybe he could get his family to chip in and get her something easier to handle. The world was made of gemstones._  
“Whose head?”  
“I don't know, boss. It's face was rotted off. Couldn't tell.”  
“And that's when you met her?”

 _The sunshine was molten gold, running down his back, spilling over his hair. It was so hot that day. Not record-breaking, but still scorching, and beads of sweat dripped from his nose. But he felt good._  
 _He felt happy, knowing he could help her. It was the least he could do._  
“I didn't really meet her. She talked to me, but I couldn't turn around. She made me look at the head.”  
“Why?”  
“Couldn't say. She's fucked up. I threw up, and she put the note in my pocket and told me to bring it to you.”  
Mercurio coughed into his hand, not really surprised to find specs of blood in his palm. Like rubies, he thought.  
 _The world was made of gemstones._  
The prince's hands were shaking with rage as he picked the note up again, but Mercurio barely noticed. His mind was filled with summer, and grass, and dew and the warm hand of an old woman, smiling despite her grief. He registered that other man, the one he hadn't been introduced to, sliding over to whisper something in LaCroix's ear.  
LaCroix looked up.  
The piercing, icy blue stare didn't bother him as much as it should.  
“... What?” He said, noticing his voice shaking a little. They were all looking at him now. The stranger with the weird glasses and trench coat, the huge sheriff that always creeped him out, and his undead boss on the other side of the desk.  
The stranger spoke is a deep voice.  
“This... “mumbo jumbo” you speak of... No doubt a blood discipline. What exactly did she do?”  
He tried to think, but whenever he focused on her voice, soft as falling rain, or the light touch on his back that had guided him towards the head in the box...  
 _Gemstones. Gemstones. The world was made of gemstones. Pearls of moisture on the outside of his glass. Garnets of light reflecting off the red paint. Clear diamonds, pink diamonds, yellow diamonds in the windows..._  
“It's like she, uh.... Like she... Made it feel ok? I don't know about that vampire stuff. Really. Like, I know how it is when LaCroix makes people do what he says, and it wasn't like that. She didn't go into my head and tell me to look, but she made me feel like... Uh, shit. Like I wanted to?”  
 _The sky is a giant glass pane, melting under the sun. Shimmering water droplets on his naked calves, wet emeralds between his toes. Shouldn't have put on flip-flops. He just wanted to lay down in the damp grass and cool off, but if he let her know he was tired, she would insist he call it a day. He wanted to help. Her murky eyes were maybe sapphires once, but now they were just ocean water. Poor old nan._  
It was getting harder to concentrate on the real world.  
LaCroix was examining him with growing suspicion.  
“There's something you're not telling me.” he stated suddenly, standing up and putting his bony hands down on the desk.  
“Does she still control you, hm? Is that it?”  
 _The world is made of gemstones. Gemstones in every breath, in every atom. He wanted to smoke but she hated the smell._  
Oh god. He might be right.  
“I don't... Fuck, I don't think so? Maybe?”  
That was the wrong thing to say. Before he knew what had happened, he was being suspended in the air, the Sheriff holding him by the shoulders about an inch off the ground.  
“I knew it!” LaCroix said triumphantly, walking around his desk, one quivering finger pointing at Mercurio.  
“You're hers! It all makes sense now. Yes... Yes of course. Why else would she ask for you?”  
He was angrier than Mercurio had ever seen him.  
“To plant a traitor amongst my ranks! Of course! Given, her mind control abilities are far more developed than they should be. Otherwise I would never have sent you.”  
If he could breathe, he would no doubt have been breathing heavily. He clasped both hands in front of his chest, closing his eyes and regaining his composure, before opening them and staring coldly at Mercurio.  
“Very well. This is how you repay me, hm? She thinks she can put a worm amongst the snakes, does she?”  
His eyes were blazing with a cold, blue fire.  
Mercurio was dropped, and landed on his knees with a painful smack. He could hear the sharp sound of metal on metal as the Sheriff drew his sword behind him.  
“It grieves me to do this to you. You have served me faithfully, until now at least, but I cannot tolerate a traitor. I trust you understand.”

  
In his last moments, Mercurio thought of his daughter. She had been a baby when he became LaCroix's ghoul. It was partly for her sake that he had done it, in fact; bad people were on his trail, and he needed to stay alive. He wanted to support his only kid, even if the mother wanted nothing to do with him.  
He sent her checks every month. Often just a hundred dollars, sometimes fifty if times were bad, two hundred if times were good. Every single month. Then the years passed, and his baby girl grew to be a woman, with a man of her own. He hadn't been invited for the wedding, but he was still happy for her.  
He had stopped then. She had her own life now. She could support herself, like a grown woman, and he was so proud of her. He hadn't seen her face since she was four, but gods be good, he was so proud. She would never know what had come of him.  
It was better that way.

  
 _You'll come back soon, won't you darling? I don't have the heart to ask you to work for me any more, at least not for a while, but you'll visit, won't you? The house is so empty with your grandfather gone. You look so much like him, dear. He would have loved to see you grow up to be such a handsome young boy. Oh, please, wipe your feet before you come in. Your shoes are full of gr_ ass!


	7. The leech lair

It was cruel to call the nosferatu sewer rats, but no one could deny how well it fit. Because of their monstrous look they had always been forced to live out of sight. The blood of their clan boiled and cracked the skin, sharpened their teeth and gave them arms like gorillas. Some were more severely inflicted than others.  
Benjin was one of those.  
His sire's embrace had curled his spine, forcing him to walk hunched over and a little to the right, boils as big as apples on his head and forehead. His long, gruesome claws scratched the ground as he hobbled along, three on each hand, and a splinter of bone had shot into his left eye to leave him half blind. You could see it if you were unfortunate enough to be in the same room as Benjin and a light source. Thin as a dagger, thick as a finger, a sliver of bone coming from inside his eye socket and coming out through the jelly of his eyeball.

Benjin was shunned by his own sort as well. Of course Gary Golden had never told him to leave, not directly, but there was no place for him in their little lair. They were all disgusted by him. He had wounds that never seemed to close, he smelled like death and infection, and looked like a mutilated corpse. Someone had once told him that “it is the inside that counts”, but Benjin could never share his inside with anyone. Years ago he had lodged a pinecone in his throat that hindered him from speaking. All he could do was make scratchy, guttural noises and wave his pink little tongue around, and that never made him any friends.  
So it had been a surprise when another nosferatu came for him. He had a little hovel down in the sewers that he had built from driftwood and trash, with all the treasures he owned piled up for safekeeping. There was a safety pin, an apple made of iron that he had found near the cemetery, and a nightlight that ran on batteries.  
That is where they found him, wrapped in a plastic sheet, watching a slug.  
He croaked when they approached him, and they reeled back.  
“Fuck's sake, what's that stench?” one of them asked, covering his face.  
“What- What is that?” the other said, poking a bloated raccoon corpse with the tip of her boot.  
Benjin croaked.  
“Hey, nasty,” the first one said in a nasal voice. He held a piece of paper.  
“Got a message for ya. Can ya read?”  
Benjin shook his head, pulling the plastic tighter around him.  
“Go figure. Okay, listen up, 'cause I'm not staying 'ere any longer than I 'ave to, get it?”  
He had a weird accent. It didn't even sound real.  
“There's some batshit malk who fancies 'erself the new king of the hill, yeah? Gary wants a word with 'er. Thinks she might be on to somethin'. She hidin' down there, he says. Says she sent him an e-mail or somethin'. Trick is, we can't find 'er. Gary says you can.”  
Benjin knew who they were talking about. He had met her in one of the dark paths, where even the rats didn't go, and she had been the only kind face he had seen in centuries. She had touched his face and called him sweet.

He had wanted to go back and visit her again, but he was afraid she might be a dream, and he didn't want to find out. Besides, she permanently smelled like blood and darkness. They weren't good smells.  
He croaked and nodded at the nosferatu. His companion stopped poking the poor dead animal and came up to his side, giving him a look.  
“Ugh, he looks like shit. Do you even known what we're saying?”  
Benjin nodded eagerly, and tried to tell them about her, but all that escaped his shredded throat was gurgles and spit. The woman wrinkled her nose. The man had no nose.  
No one could get to her. No one but him. One of her companions, a small child with giant, puffy eyes and a thin-lipped smile, had called the woman “Lady Leech”, so Benji thought of her den as the Leech lair. You had to go through a wall, wiggle your way through the blades of a slow fan, and walk for miles in complete darkness as the walls around you turned from brick to dirt. His good eye was not so good any more, but Benjin could smell the blood that was the perfume of the leech long before his steps told him he was walking on ground.  
He could find it again. He could find her.

They gave him a letter. A proper one, of paper and pen. A message from the nosferatu. They wouldn't tell him what was in it, and watched him tuck it away in his filthy vest before they finally left.  
He walked for ages. Days, most likely, and sated his hunger on rats and slimy things that lived in the backed-up sewer waters, leaving trails of flesh and blood on his ugly face. He ofted had to stop to let his disfigured joints rest. It could be a week at this pace, he knew.  
He didn't have to find out.  
The child found him instead. It was a genderless thing, pale and gaunt, with a stretched face and eyes as big as saucers. In the darkness it was hard to know their color, but there were puffy rings around them that made them bulge, and the rest of the child's features seemed tiny in comparison. It was like a freakish doll, really. He was scared until it spoke.  
Such soft, tinkling words. Words of comfort. Safety. Innocence and good regards. No one ever spoke to Benjin like that, like he was worth something, and he cried a little when he gave her his letter.  
“Would you like to come with me?” the child asked. It didn't even try to read over the letter.  
There was no light of any sort in this passage. The darkness was so thick, so dominating, he swore he could feel it as a physical presence on his mutilated skin. It had texture and scent and flavor. It was so unnatural, and so suffocating, and Benjin was crying for several reasons now.  
He croaked. The child smiled and took two of his claws in it's tiny, bony hand, and they walked together the rest of the way. The nosferatu had some time to wonder how the child didn't need to stop or eat, but he couldn't ask, and the child never spoke unless it had something to say.  
_It's voice is a treasure_ , he thought.  
_It would be a shame to squander it._  
His own voice had been deep and attractive, once upon a time. Back when he could walk the sunlit pavement and have friends. Strangely enough, he had never thought back on that time until he met the Lady Leech. Something about her made him... Remember. He remembered long nights and long days, early mornings with coffee and warmth and love.  
He didn't stop crying all the way to the Leech lair.


	8. Declaration of Friendship

(Subject) We done?

  
(From) gary@schrecknet.vtm

 

 

_Glad you like it, boss. Not even going to ask how you get wifi down there._   
_Maybe it's just me, but me and the guys are having problems deciphering your messages. Would be a pleasure if you would stop sending that unlucky bastard Benjin to deliver them._   
_Just between you and me, I think he would be better off sleeping somewhere deep down, you know?_

_To answer what I think you were asking, Mercurio is dead. Official word is that he killed himself, but I've never heard of a man slice himself in half with the Sherrif's cleaver._   
_Got a ghoul in LaCroix's den says the guy came limping in dripping with blood, and never came out. Take it as you will._

_I know the deal was that you would keep the things in the sewers out of my hair for info. You've done your part._   
_If the prince gets word, we never knew each other, ok?_

 

 

 

 

(Subject) No

  
(From) edfsdfsdf@dsjfhbsdf.no

 

_Moons howling. Find him._   
_I will bring a pelt and you will bring a rebel._   
_I will. You will. **It drips.**_


	9. Gary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who has two thumbs and hasn't updated for two years? Thisssss guyyy

There was barely anything left in the sewers by now. Normal and paranormal animals alike had been hunted down or fled, leaving the dripping, dark passages completely empty. Brave nosferatu looking for treasure found themselves circling the same places over and over again, afraid to enter the stagnant darkness. Most of it didn’t belong to them anymore.

Gary Golden had, in a stroke of genius, welcomed the evil presence into his home with open arms. No doubt he thought she was just going to hide far away from his own little settlement and not bother him, but no one had heard him complain when she started expanding. Truth be told, she hadn’t actually laid claim to anything but her little lair and what pipes he had granted her, but the more she hunted and prowled, the stronger the scent of rot and impurity became, to the point where fledgling nosferatu could notice it the second they came down the manholes.   
Let no one say she had ever harmed those that strayed into her territory, though. In fact, the stronger and older sewer rats who could stomach the smell and uneasy air, had grabbed many of the now abandoned cisterns to build themselves little lairs of their own, enjoying privacy in a way that was rare in the nosferatu settlement. Amongst them was Gary Golden.

The primogen had been the boldest of them all. When the things in the warrens stopped showing up, he had contacted her again and established a secure exchange of information. No one else seemed to appreciate just how useful it could be to have a supermaniac living on your porch. She mowed the metaphorical lawn, killing anything and everything that even came close to bothering them, and she sent him a variety of messages almost daily, full of cryptic and sometimes useful information. Comments on stock exchange and the street value of Scandinavian animals had been her favorites lately.  
She hadn’t given him any name yet, though. Benjin called her “Eckh”. Poor thing.  
Hey, he was all about taking the beautiful down a few pegs, but Benjin was a truly unfortunate incident. He looked even worse than his sire, who Gary had only known for a couple of weeks. He had been shot trying to escape through the forest, mistaken for some animal no doubt, to the delight of cryptozoologists everywhere when the grainy picture snapped moments before disintegration made it out on the internet. They called him the “Batman of Hollywood”. If they had only seen his childe.   
While the other nosferatu despited Benjin, Gary had grown to pity him. He was hunched, half-blind and mute, with the weakest set of powers Gary had ever seen on a vampire. His wounds took weeks to close, he couldn’t charm a rat with a piece of cheese, and his twisted skeleton tired him out if he tried to hobble further than anyone could throw him. Gary had known of Benjin since he was turned, and often regretted not just killing the thing when he had the chance. Now “Eckh” had made him into her own little Igor, and no one dared put him out of his misery.

He had a lot of time to contemplate this as he walked behind the painfully slow creature, deeper into the suffocating darkness of the warrens. This darkness was more than just the lack of light. It was a powerful, crushing sensation of emptiness, like a visible vacuum, permeated by the stench that was “Eckh’s” calling card. It was a smell like nothing Gary had ever known before. It had elements of iron and general decay, but there was something else in there, something so vile and disturbing it felt like it was seeping into his skin and staining his bones. To think Benjin had to traverse these corridors every day. It was enough to make a brave man cry.  
“How much farther?” Gary asked him, as the little man limped his way forward. Benjin made a noise of distress. He stopped, started gesturing, until the extra energy expense seemed too much for him to bear and he slumped against the wall they were following.  
“We’ve been walking for hours,” Gary observed, looking at the poor creature in the barely existent light. He had a flashlight, but even that marvel of technology seemed suffocated by this unnatural darkness. He could only see his hand in front of his face and Benjin.  
“Chk”, Benjin gurgled. Gary had often wondered what had ruined his vocal cords so much that not even his vampire generation could fix it, weak as it was. Benjin had been this way for years. By now, he was starting to think it had to be something physical lodged in there.  
“Whck f chk”.  
If he needed air, Benjin would surely be wheezing. He gestured weakly to the wall behind him, and Gary lifted the torch.  
On the wall, barely visible, was a symbol. A large circle with two smaller circles inside it, a thin line drawn beneath them, like a stick figure face.  
“Did you draw that?” Gary asked, puzzled. Benjin nodded.  
“Chk”, he elaborated. That was massively useful.  
Gary had forgotten what it felt like to actually suffocate. There weren’t many things his body needed now, and if he was deprived of, say, blood, it usually felt like hunger. Not like this.  This felt like drowning. A sensation that was best forgotten, he thought as he studied the symbol Benjin had made for him. Too bad the poor sod couldn’t read or write, or maybe they could have actually communicated in some meaningful way. He supposed he just had to stay patient and wait for his guide to regain some strength.  
“I see with my little eye…” He began, when the eerie noise of splashing came to him from the other end of the hallway. He swung around and pointed his light in the direction, but he couldn’t see anything.  
He liked to think those slimy things that used to bother him had all been scared out of the sewers by now, but visions of them floated to the top of his mind as he listened to the splashes coming closer. Splish, splish, splish. Rhythmic. Like footsteps.  
“Hello?” he called, the echo of his voice swallowed by the darkness. He thought he could make out a vague, pale outline in the distance, slowly approaching his light as the sound became louder. Splish, splish, splish.  
Benjin got up on his feet in a sad show of strength, and hobbled enthusiastically towards the edge of the light. Now he could see, slowly emerging, the figure of something small and humanoid. Like a child.

The thing had a giant head, presumably to house its two massive eyes, which were situated very close to a cute little button nose and a very thin smile. It was wearing a cloak of something black, and if it had hair it was as white as its skin. The sight of it set off alarm bells in every part of him, and he had already decided to turn and run when it spoke.  
It was a chiming, delicate voice, made of raindrops and silver. It caught him so off guard he completely forgot to be afraid for a moment.  
“Benjin, sweetie, you are tired. Rest. You have done your job well. The Lady Leech will have no more need of you tonight.”  
Benjin was blubbering and croaking, clutching at the thing’s cloak with his bent, dirty fingers. It sounded almost like crying.  
When it turned its saucepan eyes on Gary, he swore he could have pissed himself if he had a working bladder. He couldn’t tell the color, only that they seemed to be seeing right through him and into… His soul? Did he have a soul anymore?  
It bent a long, slim finger at him, and turned, dislodging poor Benjin from its clothes. As Gary followed uncertainly he could hear the broken nosferatu calling after them in a high, desperate voice that snapped unexpectedly.

After that, they walked in silence.  
Towards the maw of the beast.


	10. A sun among the stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for vague dubcon. Nothing graphic.

The Leech Den was really a cavern more than anything- A perfectly smooth, spherical room carved straight out of the earth, crude but pleasing to the eye. As Gary Golden entered he was met with light, warmth and music, providing a blessed relief from the oppressive hallways that led him here.  
The short thing, his guide, slipped from his side and seemed to disappear in the many tapestries insulating the walls.

She had made a very special scene. In an almost perfect mimic of their first meeting, she had arranged a beautiful old oaken table and several costly chairs to be brought down here, now laden with food and guests. The food had rotted, the wine had aired out and dried up, and the people weren’t very talkative any more, but they were there. For him.  
He remembered how they first met. She had sought him down in the warrens and happened on a little pretend party he had been throwing. He had spoken to her, obfuscated, and convinced her he was just another voice in her kooky little malkavian brain. That had been fun for a while.  
Now she was the host of her own party. Her guests were fresher than his had been, still seeping and staring rather than just skeletons in pretty clothes, but he supposed that was a matter of taste. Around him the large room was padded and decorated with carpets and tapestries as far as the eye could see. Not the expensive stuff, just salvation army by the look of it, but an effort had been made.  
“Cast and crew only, boss,” a gentle voice said from somewhere in front of him. That made him laugh, breaking up the suffocating darkness that had been collecting in his lungs.  
“Did I crash your party, boss?” He asked the air. She was pretty decent with her disciplines, but when it came to obfuscate no one could beat Gary Golden. He could see her shimmering outline by the table.  
“Just in time, Gary.”  
She appeared.

A lot had changed since the last time they saw each other eye to eye. He could remember freckles and golden eyes, bony knees and a little too much ambition. The woman that stood in front of him now seemed…. Hardened, in a way. Her skin was a soft, pearl velvet, with fingers like daggers and jagged teeth barely poking over her lower lip. Her eyes were still golden, but now they were noticeably shining in the light of a thousand candles placed around her den, and she was looking at him directly instead of that far-away dreaming gaze she had last time. She was wearing a pretty little black dress in a style that reminded Gary of Mae West, whom he had known long, long ago, in another life.  
“This is for you,” she declared, throwing her arms out and gesturing to her “guests”. The tempting scent of fresh blood reeked from the corpses, and Gary found his mouth watering. His diet had consisted of more rats than he liked admitting lately, and if she was offering…  
As if reading his mind she swept towards the nearest guest, a young man who still looked half alive, tilting his head back with one hand and grabbing at his throat with the other. Before Gary could blink he was holding a relatively clean wineglass, filled to the brim with fresh, succulent blood.  
The man was flashing a bright red smile beneath his chin.

Later, Gary couldn’t recall what they talked about. She was so hard to understand, and after a point he would just listen to the soft tones of her voice as he sipped from his glass, feeling properly warm for the first time in years. This environment was what he was made for. He had grown to a man in a world filled with neon signs and limousines, where looking in the mirror was a daily joy and not an exercise in character building, a world with plenty of food and beautiful women.  
Strange. He rarely ever thought about those days any more, but something about this place, or his host, made him remember so easily. It could be the music, he supposed. It wasn’t a tune he had heard before, but it sounded very familiar.  
He found his foot tapping as he emptied his glass and put it on the table. As he stood, she did the same, sliding over to him with the grace of a cloud.  
“Before you go…” She whispered. He found a sharp hand on his shoulder, the other on his hip, and as she let herself fall he dipped her instinctively.  
“Won’t you teach me how to move, mister Golden?”

He knew what she was doing. Setting this up, bringing music and smells to remind him of better times, giggling and dressing like a twenties starlet. It was so obvious she was trying to manipulate him. He didn’t know why, only that it wouldn’t work.  
Still, it would be rude to refuse his host a dance.  
The music carried them over the floor. He noticed how breathy her laughter was, how predatory her smile seemed, how she held her skirt in one hand to control how it flowed when she spun in front of him. Gary hadn’t had a dance partner since the embrace. At least not a good one.  
“Come here often?” He asked as she spun towards him and grabbed his outstretched hand, curling it around herself in time with the music. He thought the smell in the warrens was her doing, but in here, when she was so close they could be one person, he couldn’t smell it at all. She smelled like cigars and copious amounts of perfume.  
“Not really my kind of scene,” she answered, her voice breathless. She turned, their fingers intertwined at shoulder level, his left hand on her hip. The music changed subtly.  
He could hear the drums more clearly now, beating like a heart.  
“Then what brought you, boss?”  
He meant the question, and could see she understood as he dipped her as deep as he dared. She brought her knee up to his waist.  
He noticed how long her hair had gotten, which was strange when he thought about it, seeing as how hair and nails really stopped growing after the embrace. It reached the floor when he held her like this.  
“I dream of fame, mister. I want my face in the pictures, the blinding blitz of the red carpet.” Her voice was the exact pitch of the music.  
It was fun to play pretend with someone else for once, but this had to come to an end, Gary decided. If not, her ruse might just work.  
“Well…” He said slowly, weighing his words carefully. It was extraordinarily difficult to play “guess what I really mean” with a malkavian. Those guys were just layers of metaphors all the way down.  
“I think I know a guy.” he landed on.  
Her laughter sounded genuine this time.  
  
She was a silver mist around him, pulling, leading on her tippy toes. The music was pooling in his mind and spinning him around. He didn’t know what tune he was following, only that if he stopped he could never dance again.  
Her hands were on his chest, around his neck, caressing the stretched skin of his once-handsome face. He stepped forward, pushing her back. She stepped back, dragging him forward.  
_We either hit the wall or we do this forever_ , he thought.  
He couldn’t decide which option he preferred.  
In his head the world was made of neon signs and limousine rides, cocaine nosebleeds and starlets in his lap, megaphones screaming his name to the frenzy of paparazzi. The warmth of her arms felt like floodlights, the nape of her neck smelled like powder makeup. Her laughter was a low buzz of electronic equipment.  
He was surprised when they landed among silken pillows. Not because he hadn’t seen them when he came in, but because he hadn’t noticed that they fell at all.  
Her lips were trailing his collarbone, whispering something with a voice he had never heard before. Whatever she was doing, it trapped him like a maelstrom. He was about to go under.  
His right hand found hers and held on. With his left he frantically searched the ground beside them, clawing through the cheap fibers of a carpet, until he held something small, hard and real.  
A pebble.  
He squeezed it as hard as he could, a moment of blessed clarity following the pain. Whatever she wanted, whatever she was doing, it was going to eat him alive if he didn’t anchor himself. Her voice was louder now.  
The dress she was wearing was sliding off her shoulders as she cupped his ugly face. He closed his eyes, gripped his pebble, and let her take him.

The domination of a vampire was a strange feeling. Gary had never been big on it himself, leaving all the manipulation and seduction to the less monstrous kindred, but he thought he had a pretty good grip on how it worked. He had heard it described as a “mental force”, like a vampire’s voice magnified inside your head until you did what it said. This was nothing like that.  
She washed over him, her massive influence coursing through his brain and leaving nothing behind. Most of him fell deeper and deeper down his own rabbit hole, leaving a small, terrified part of him, still clutching a pebble and barely staying afloat on the pain it caused. He was vaguely aware of her physical body over him, claws digging into his ribs, a gasping mouth by his ear as she… Did whatever it was she was doing. He was too busy to worry about their bodies, now that her mind was threatening to swallow his whole.  
  
In his memory, they were all made of porcelain. The ballroom was filled with smooth, white dolls, delicately crafted cigarette holders in their gloved hands. His friends had been handsome but now they were just dolls, roaring with drunken laughter at some joke he had made.  
He saw his own face reflected in the silver spoon in his drink. Clean-shaven, strong-jawed, gorgeous in every sense of the word. Except when he tried to grab the spoon to look closer, his hand was balled into a fist he couldn’t open, and now that he was thinking about it he could feel something small, hard and real…  
_Her teeth were on his cheek, the silence between her moans broken by a soft, wet sound from somewhere in the room. The pain in his hand was pulling at him. Where had his suit gone?_

Now someone screamed for the band, and Gary joined the thunderous applause when Freddy and the boys took the small stage. Freddy noticed him, and with a show of energy he grabbed the microphone stand to speak.  
 “Laaaaadies and gentlemen! How’re y’all doing tonight?” Freddy said, his voice booming through the speakers on the floor. The drinking crowd cheered in response. Freddy laughed his hiccupping, hyena-like laughter, and yelled over them all.  
“How’d’ya like the premiere? Is “Tap Hotel” going to be hailed for centuries to come?! Let me hear it!”  
Gary wasn’t clapping. The screams of the premiere seemed far away. He was clenching his hand, so hard his nails were digging into his soft, pink flesh.  
_They were so close they could have been one being, arms and legs twined together, and she was whispering to him with that beautiful, soft voice she had._  
_Their joining was taking them up, up above atmosphere, launching their immortal souls towards the stars, and yet Gary found himself rooted to the ground. The stabbing pain in his palm kept him sane._  
  
“Aaaaand don’t forget the wonderful people, the amazingly talented talents, Hollywood’s shooting stars that brought you all here today! New on the scene, you all saw her first ever feature on the big screen today, let’s give her a taste of what fame and glory feels like! Sophie Belle!”  
A thin, southern girl with the doe look of innocent youth, Sophie blushed prettily and waved to her new friends.  
_“Mine,” someone whispered above him. He saw the flickering of candles through closed eyelids. With his index finger he rolled the pebble in his hand to a new spot, and prayed that the fresh blood that swelled wouldn’t alert her._  
_“You’ll be mine, all of you. I’ll keep you safe, voice. Keep you with me forever.”_  
  
“But good people, we can’t forget the main man, can we?”  
The group shouted their agreement. He felt heavy hands pat him hard on the back, his eager friends and colleagues pushing him forward.  
“… But where is he?!” Freddy shouted, a look of dramatic terror on his face.  
“Why, did he leave early? Where? Is? Goooorgeous Gary Golden?!”  
Laughter rang in his ears as Gary jumped forward, gracious as always, to the applause of his adoring fans. There were thirty, maybe forty people in the crowd, but they sounded like the whole world to him.  
Freddy put a hand around his shoulders and squeezed him.  
“Here he is! The one and only, a sun amongst the stars! Ladies, I am reading your minds, and yes! This stallion here is still on the market!”  
More laughter. Gary reached for the microphone, having practiced his little speech in his head this entire time, but his hand wouldn’t open. Why was he holding a rock?  
_She howled, then. Gary was forced back to reality just in time to feel her body spasm against his, her face buried in his chest to muffle the scream that had burst from her. He was slick with blood, but he didn’t know who it belonged to. Her face slowly rose to meet his gaze, polished gold against pale green, and when she smiled he saw red stains on her teeth._  
“Wakey wakey, sleepy dead.”

They didn’t speak while dressing, but his host was humming a deep, comforting tune. Afterwards he got up, helped her to get feet, and felt the music fade slowly.  
Something had happened there. Something final.  
He didn’t like the taste in his mouth any more.  
“Thank you for visiting,” she said. The laughter was gone from her voice, but it still played around her lips.  
“No problem, boss,” he replied with a mocking little bow. He was alert now, ears twitching as he quickly tried to recap his surroundings. The ringing of laughter and clinking of glasses was still playing in his head, and the bloody smells and pretty sights that had seemed so inviting when he arrived seemed grotesque to him now.  
She smiled like they had a secret together. He wished she would tell him what it was.

He refused the guide, that little humanoid thing with the insect eyes, and instead walked in darkness and silence to his cistern. The lack of light had been oppressive before, the stench of decay so pungent it had made him dizzy, but on his way back he barely noticed it. His head was swimming with her voice.  
_I dream of fame, mister._  
Hadn’t someone said those exact words to him before? Where had the blood down his front come from? What, exactly, had transpired?  
It made him deeply uncomfortable to think about now. What had he gotten himself into? Had he stepped out of his comfortable, neutral zone and accidentally picked a side in the political game?  
… No. No, it was just a dance. A session of pretending, a fake party and some live music to forget the cold, crushing existence all kindred shared. No one could blame him for that.  
Besides, it hadn't worked. Her juju hadn't consumed him. He had resisted her charms enough to keep his own mind, and now he knew personally what she was capable of. She was more than just a dangerous, orphaned malkavian hiding from The Man in his back yard.

He reached the haven, and only when he saw the booming stereo of his childe did he realize something.  
There had been no record player in the Leech Den.


	11. Nines

The Last Round was never jumping, _exactly_ , but it was rarely this quiet.  
Nines Rodriguez was tapping an uneven rhythm with his coffee cup, denting the already dented table, looking at the piece of paper between them without really seeing it. Jack had brought it in.  
Jack had an affinity for bad news, it seemed.  
It was a simple letter really, written on the other side of a promotional coupon that expired two years ago, advertising the “ _Fabulous offer of two free donuts when donating blood – Serve your community today!”._ It said:

 

 _Nine_  
Wolves howl in the city streets  
You should run  
But wolves howl everywhere  
Where are you safe?  
\- Me

 

“You sure it’s from her?” he asked. His cup tapped away.  
Jack nodded.  
“Got it straight from that goblin-looking motherfucker she uses as an errand boy. I can’t believe that thing is still alive. Feel kinda sorry for him.”  
Jack wasn’t smiling now.  
Skelter was reading the note over and over again, as if looking for some clue they had all missed, turning it over to stare at the promotional offer on the other side before re-reading the actual letter. The words were written in blue pen, the letters were unremarkable in themselves, and the message was still unclear.  
A warning. Perhaps a show of good will, or a threat.  
Nines didn’t know which option he liked the least.

“I hear werewolves are on the rise,” Skelter mumbled, his amber eyes flitting over the words again.  
“Maybe that’s what she means?”  
“What, a bunch of actual wolves breaking into The Last Round?” Nines could almost smile.  
“Doubt it. Haven’t heard of anyone in the city yet. Fucking malkavians, she’s probably talking about some big dog she saw.”  
Jack laughed, breaking the suffocating atmosphere.  
“That’s gotta be a huge fucking dog, then! Ah, goddamn. No, really, I think she’s just tryna warn us, or just you. No secret his majesty had been on edge since she started her own little fanclub down with the nosferatu. Got a friend down there saying Gary is in love with her, and he won’t tell the prince she’s down there. That’s fucking useless, isn’t it? Everyone knows.”  
They nodded in silent agreement.   
“It’s weird,” Nines reflected, abruptly stopping his tapping.  
“She seemed fine when I met her. Remember when they executed her sire?”  
“Oh yeah,” Jack replied.  
“I scooped her up afterwards. Showed her the ropes a little bit. Seemed a little too into eating rats, but other than that she was fine. Batshit, obviously, but not worse than any other malk I’ve met.” He shook his head.  
Skelter broke in unexpectedly.  
“It’s true she ran with the Sabbat for a while?”  
Nines looked at him in surprise. He hadn’t even heard that rumor, but Jack explained.  
“Not really. Captain Dramatic apparently sent her on a suicide mission to deal with some Sabbat operating in the Hollowbrook. She did it, but from what I hear the boss was a Tzimisce who could, like, manipulate flesh or something. Like blood magic. He fucked her up before dying and they had to go get her. She wasn’t the same after that.”

“That’s not what I heard,” an unexpected voice shot in. Damsel had joined them, her fiery eyes more alive than all of them combined. She pulled up a chair and sat with her chest to the back, legs tapping on either side of it.  
“I heard…” She looked at each of them, making sure she had their undivided attention. As the youngest of the group she was always looking to prove herself, and this time the glee in her face said she knew something juicy, something they didn’t know.  
“That she _ate_ him.”

They let that soak in for a while. Jack’s face was set in stone, Skelter looked confused, and Nines just shook his head.  
“Who?”  
“The Sabbat boss!” Damsel said, annoyed that her news hadn’t shaken them up more.  
“I actually have a buddy down in Santa Monica, a thin-blood hiding by the beach. He saw her. She talked to them before breaking into the carnival, and he says she had these big black streaks in her aura. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? An orphaned fledgling running errands for the fucking capes, somehow kills a whole hotel of Sabbat, gets rid of their crazy powerful leader, and next thing you know she’s breaking out of the tower and starting a cult in the sewers. She’s, like, two weeks old! How is she going to do that without somehow getting a lot of power, really fast?”  
Nines found he didn’t have words. Jack wasn’t smiling any more, and Skelter looked really sick. Nines couldn’t blame him.  
What Damsel was talking about so casually was diablerie, a disgusting crime that let one vampire drink another one dry to absorb his powers, and some say his personality.  
“That’s disgusting,” Skelter mumbled. Damsel looked taken aback.  
“Yeah, it is,” she agreed a little too fast  
“But what if it’s true? You can see it in the aura, right?”  
Nines shook his head. What he knew of diablerie was all learned from his dealings with the Sabbat, and he couldn’t use auspex, the discipline that let you see auras. As far as he knew, none of them could.  
  
“It’s true…” Jack finally said, his face still grave. He was looking right at Damsel, who seemed uncertain under his gaze. Jack was the oldest of them, the strongest, and undoubtedly the one who knew the most about vampiric lore.  
“Apparently, diablerie, which is _fucking disgusting, Damsel,_ and one of the few things that are illegal for a reason, gives your aura veins. It’s how kindred knows not to get near you.”  
Damsel nodded, less enthusiastic now that she knew she was stepping on rotten ice.  
“That’s what my buddy said, anyway. She was nice to him, but he said he couldn’t be near her for long. Something about her smell.”  
“Do you still have this contact on the beach?” Nines asked:  
“No…” Damsel confessed, her spirit seemingly dampened.  
“He left when she did, and doesn’t want to go back. I tried to get him to go into the carnival but he said he’d rather be caught and killed in his apartment than be anywhere near that place. The other thin-bloods still hang out, though, they just won’t talk to me.”

They sat in silence a while after that, Damsel’s theory hanging heavy in the air between them. Nines was reading the letter again, mulling over the words, thoughts of werewolves and diablerie floating through his head and tangling together. He remembered seeing the fledgling up on that stage as LaCroix spewed his political propaganda, but Nines had barely been listening.  
_She had been a thin, tall woman, scantily dressed in a teal and white cheerleaders uniform, her sleek brown hair cut into bangs and pulled into a pony tail. She had been staring at the ground, with her bright hazel eyes round and terrified. It had barely been an hour after the embrace. If an unexpected conversion to the afterlife was scary for any one, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a malkavian._  
 _He had looked at her the entire time, trying to catch her eye, but she had just stared for miles and miles, looking at something no one else could see. Shaking like a leaf._  
 _So when the prissy prince had started talking about how she was a “danger to their society” and how this “was all so unfortunate”, Nines had spoken up. Saved her life, most likely, as the prince wasn’t quite ready to start a war by executing innocents in front of them all. She had been allowed to live that day, and Nines could still see in his minds eye her violently shaking legs as The Sheriff pulled her up, pushing her to the side of the stage._

 _They had met again the first time she came downtown. He had gone to meet her, to get a feeling for where her loyalties might lay._  
 _He could still hear the hard, unmistakable sound of a baseball bat hitting bone, and had rounded the corner just in time to see her fall to the Sabbat. He had scared them away, bent to help her…_  
 _Yes, he could see her now. Clear as a Sunday morning. He remembered how she had been trembling when he pulled her up, how bright and distant her eyes had been, her face freckled and sad. She had gotten rid of her cheerleading outfit and was wearing a summer dress, a short little thing made of flowing fabric, dyed bright blue around a white floral pattern._  
 _“What are you doing?” She had asked in the smallest voice in the world._  
 _“I was about to fucking DESTROY THEM.”_  
 _“Want me to call them back?” He quipped, and saw her face twitch into a smile._  
 _“Round two, FIGHT.”_  
 _When he introduced himself, she had looked straight into his eyes, and yet he still had the feeling that she had never seen him. She had been staring straight through him, past his skull and into something far, far away. Something only she could see._  
 _“My mind has many names,” she had told him. Her voice was light as air._  
 _“My body, none.”_  
 _Goddamn malkavians._  
  
_He had showed her the way to the last round. He was sure she had been under orders to come directly to the tower, so her willingness to follow him could have meant she leaned towards their side. Or maybe just that she was another stupid, overconfident fledgling thinking kindred were all one, happy family._  
 _Halfway she had suddenly stopped. Looking back, he had seen her gazing up at a road sign, a look of confusion and rage on her face._  
 _“… Stop?” She had asked no one. Nines took two step back and looked too._  
 _Yep, that was a stop sign._  
 _“No, you stop! Stop! AAAH, STOP IT! You’ve made a powerful enemy today, sign!”_  
 _Nines had seriously reconsidered._  
  
_In front of the door, he had given it to her straight. Eyes open, ears peeled, don’t give in to the beast and The Camarilla is full of shit. They didn’t belong in this city, and if she was on their side, then neither did she._  
 _He could still hear her in his head. Different words, sure, but the same message he had gotten from every neonate that died an early second death._  
 _“The tower is an orphanage, a haven for the likes of me. What else would I do? The Jester-prince is much better at chess than I have ever been.”_

Now rumor had it that she was starting her own clique.

“If Damsel is right,” Nine began, but Jack interrupted him.  
“No way. All we got is the word of some fourteenth generation beach boy. I don’t have anything against thinbloods, but their disciplines just aren’t as good as they could be. I doubt any of them even knows what diablerie is, how is he supposed to know what a messed-up aura means? Fuck, if she was a fucking diablerist there would have been a bloodhunt on her.”  
Damsel seemed to have had that thought herself.  
“She went into hiding, didn’t she?” she spat angrily. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell when Damsel was actually pissed off from when she just used her normal voice.  
“And Gary doesn’t care about the fucking capes, does he? He-“  
“Gary isn’t one of the Camarilla dogs,” Jack broke in, his own anger seeping into his voice now.  
“But even he can’t ignore a bloodhunt on someone living in his goddamn back yard, Damsel. They would wipe him the fuck out. No, I’m not buying it. If Sunny ate someone, there would be a bloodhunt. If there was a bloodhunt, she’d be dead. She’s not dead, so ding-dong you’re wrong. End of story.”  
They stewed in silence for a bit, Damsel brimming with anger but out of words.  
After a good, long while, Skelter spoke in an amused voice.  
“Sunny?”  
“That’s her name,” Jack confirmed with a shrug.  
“She told me after that whole shebang with her sire.”  
  
“That’s ironic.”


	12. You fucked up

LaCroix had, predictably, not bothered to inform his lowly human security guard that she was no longer allowed there, so she just waltzed in the front door like she owned the place. Under the guise of a surprise party she convinced her donut-loving lover to not announce her presence. From there it was just a matter of taking the elevator to the second-highest floor and shimmying into a ventilation shaft.  
She knew Gary would crack any day now and reveal her exact location, that was no secret. Word had got out surprisingly quickly about her underground hiding place, but the nosferatu had claimed she was somewhere out of their reach, and no one else were lining up to comb over the filthy sewers. Unless precious prince Sebastian called a blood hunt on her, she was out of sight and out of mind.  
Gary had been feeding her everything he heard. No one had caught wind of her crime yet, only that she had scorned the prince and he wanted her punished.  
That was why she was here now. Her objective was clear; find and destroy any evidence of her crime, leaving the prince without proof when her trial inevitably came. More specifically she wanted to take back the note she had sent with Mercurio, as it was a black-on-white confession. That piece of paper could seal her fate.  
Not many things frightened her, but the final death sure did, along with large spiders, Caine and the Sheriff.  
She scuttled like a little bug through the walls, following her nose. She couldn’t smell LaCroix, but she smelled his bodyguard, and she had never seen the two apart.  
  
Finally, after what felt like months of worming through the claustrophobic vents, she found a grate that positively stunk of Mr. Big n’ Bad. She couldn’t see anyone in the room below her, but if her calculations were correct she was now right above LaCroix’s office, where the sheriff, the desk and sarcophagus lived. She just had to obfuscate herself before she fell down. Easy.  
Her stomach was full of fresh blood, kindly donated by a working girl right outside the tower. She could do this.  
As a bonus, His Majesty Asspain McGee seemed to be out for the night, as she smelled no trace of him in the building or the surrounding areas.  
The grate fell open, gentle and soundless, and so did she. A quick look around confirmed everything her superpowered nose had already told her.  
There, guarding the desk, was the gargoyle creature that had been known as the sheriff. “Like someone embraced a doped-up gorilla,” Jack had once said, and it was pretty accurate. Still, the sight of him made her feel positively goopy. She had a thing for unique, threatening and powerful people.  
Sitting unopened and mystical on the marble floor was the Ankaran Sarcophagus. Between the two sat the impressively dull desk that she hoped LaCroix had stored her confession in.  
Obfuscated, she crept closer to the desk on soundless feet, keeping her eye on the sheriff all the while. He stood still as a statue and stared at nothing. As her hands found the locked drawer she allowed herself to take a deep, long breath of his scent. It was salty and dirty. She wondered if he tasted the same.  
She had to shuffle closer to him to tug at the other drawer, her head right next to his giant hand. There was dried blood under his nails. A hundred, tiny white scars littered his fingertips. She wanted to nibble them.  
She tugged lightly at the drawer, and to her absolute horror it slid open with the tiniest of creaks, like an alarm. Two seconds after she was suspended in the air, unobfuscated, clutching at the vice-like grip on her throat with fervor. He threw her across the room and sent her smashing into the opposite wall, making a nice, malkavian-sized dent and a crack in her skull. She stood on shaking feet and watched death approach.  
_You fucked up_ , a voice whispered.

What a massive man, she thought, as one of her trembling hands found the wall behind her. He was walking so slowly it seemed almost deliberate. That gigantic blade was held straight out of his body, ready to skewer her, and she wondered where he found the strength from. It had to be extremely heavy.  
_Attack_ , a voice whispered, but it was quiet and uncertain.  
_Can’t you take him?_

She had spent the majority of her new life convinced she could take anything, anyone, but faced with the shuffling golem of a man and his ridiculous weapon, she couldn’t help but wonder. She didn’t even know what he _was_. Some kind of vampire, she guessed, but from where? What was his powers? Did he have a second form, like Andrei?  
In fact, a lot of the situation reminded her of Andrei. The Sheriff had the same stony complexion, the same determination in his face, the same… Irresistible power.  
She wanted to eat him. She wanted him to let her eat him, like Andrei had, devour him whole and feel the last spasms of his muscles underneath her as she ended his unlife.  
That gave her an idea.  
“Please,” She said, holding up both of her sharp hands as a sign of surrender.  
“This isn't what it looks like! Many stars I have wished upon, but never for quarrel. Not with you.”  
If he heard her he didn’t care. The office was cavernous, and his slow steps took a while to reach her, but he was coming nonetheless.  
“You hold no love for that man!” she insisted, feeling the wall behind her back. She could feel the hard, unforgiving cement and the cold steel beams hiding inside it, but if she had to, could she break it?  
_You’re fast, you’re strong, you need to run at him and stun him long enough to reach the window_ , the quiet voice inside her whispered. A more alluring one answered.  
_Don’t leave him. Never leave him. Keep him inside you, forever and ever._  
Inside her… How many times had she used her body to win favors in this life? Would this golem, loyal servant of unknown origin, be susceptible to her charms?  
She doubted it. Wherever he had come from, whatever era he had left his human life (if he had ever had one at all), she was sure his carnal desires were far behind him. Still, it didn’t hurt to try. He seemed in no particular rush.  
“Sheathe your sword, big man,” she whispered, her low voice carrying across the room and deafening his thunderous boots.  
“And I will be your sheath forever.”

That made him halt, just for a moment. He looked at her, his face betraying nothing.  
_Just like Andrei. It’s your true sire all over again._  
The sudden stop allowed her to see him truly for the first time, to smell him on the wind. If she had her powers back then, would she had been able to look into Andrei the way she looked into the sheriff now?  
Inside him she saw vast, dry landscapes. A scorching sun so far forgotten it was difficult for even her to dig up. Sweat, a soft hand, blisters bursting and his feet becoming calloused. A vague memory of perfume and hot, sweet coffee with condensed milk. A country where the sun never went down.  
She saw a massive, bat-like creature digging its way out of a husk of a man, reborn like baby spiders after consuming their mothers inside. A tiny, blonde bug scuttling towards him, bearing promises of a home far away from home. A new place.  
Was he the last of his kind? Did he long for home?  
Inside him she saw only reasoning and loyalty, the sun of his homeland having scorched away his humanity long, long ago. He had stopped now, not because he considered her offer, but because he considered taking her alive. His prince would like her alive, to question and berate, so he could feel in control.  
She was right about one thing though. The Sheriff had no love for the jester.

“Take me,” she whispered, opening her arms and hoping she had read him right.  
“Wrap me up and deliver me to your master. You can braid my hair into a bow. I don’t mind.”  
He moved faster than anything she had seen before. The last she remembered was a flash of hands, the smell of wood, and then the world was gone.


	13. Idiot

She didn’t get to meet the prince. Afraid? Busy celebrating? All she knew was that when her eyes opened, she had been confined to a roomy maintenance closet somewhere below the ivory tower. She could still smell and hear everything above her, and yet several sturdy rings of metal kept her bound to her chair. A large, heavy and probably expensive table was set in front of her, matching the ornate high-backed chair on the opposite side. Personal furniture that had been stored away, no doubt.  
They didn’t feed her down there. It felt like a soft, fleshy barrier had been laid over her brain all this time, and now it was slowly, painfully, rotting away. When she awoke every evening, it was to the gnawing feeling in her empty stomach, and the increasing delusions of the voices in her head.  
_You’re going to die here,_ the most dominant one whispered. Over and over.  
_You’ll rot in here and then rot in hell.  
Fucking idiot. Why did you get caught? Death in battle would have been quick. Stupid, stupid, stupid.  
Anything. Do anything they want. Crawl naked over broken glass if you need to. Jump out of your skin and hurl your skeleton against the window. Anything.  
_ It took her a while to pick out a voice from the sneering, invisible crowd. It was a familiar one. She was certain it wasn’t hers.  
“Hellooo?” The voice called. Her ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, but she still looked up.  
Across from her stood a tall, beastly silhouette with a pair of glowing canine eyes.  
“Werewolf,” she whispered to it. It sat down on the chair across the table, looking at the massive steel chair they had bound her to with an expression of curious dismay.  
“I see you recognize me, fledgling. Surely, you know by now that I am not an actual werewolf, don’t you?”  
Beckett was using his unique voice, a condescending blend of sarcasm and curiosity that had been earned through decades of research, full of knowledge that she didn’t have. Through her starved eyes she couldn’t seem to locate his pupils, his gaze was just a blur of orange, shifting dizzyingly across her face.  
“This death sucks.” She told him. A thousand maggots were burrowing in her bones.  
“Oh, not as bad as it could be, surely. Besides, the final death is still miles away, childe. If you play your cards right.”  
_Liar. Sadistic wolf-fucker. He’s going to watch you heave your guts up and disintegrate._  
“C-cards?” weak laughter bubbled from her lips, running down her neck and disappearing over the floor.  
“I must have left them in my other body. The one that isn’t a hungry, useless, parody of a living creature.”  
Beckett leaned back and folded his gloved hands in his lap. Those nauseating eyes were fixed on hers.  
_What is he seeing? If he knows, death. If he doesn’t, starvation and then death. You’ve lost. Stupid._  
“You won’t die here. The prince will undoubtedly want to make an example of you. All he needs to know now is just what to accuse you of, and I hear he’s had no luck so far.”  
He was taking his sweet time, probably making sure his words had actually reached her before moving on.  
“If you would allow me to ask a couple of questions, we can discuss what I keep to myself and what I put on your charges. It seems to me that you are marked whatever you do. You have nothing to lose now, so why keep your tongue?”  
When they wanted to, her voices could melt together into some horrifying amalgam of her subconscious, and now they did just that. Before she could stop herself, all her different thoughts and ideas pooled their strength together and burst from her mouth in a panic.  
“ _I WANT TO LIVE!_ I’m stupid, fresh and green, I want to prowl the temporary dark until the father measures my scalp with his scales, and after that I shall live headless! Every second the jester stands without answers is another second to the top of my hourglass. _”_  
She might be dead, but she had enough self-preservation and instinct for an eternity. Her long, clawed fingers started twitching against the chair, spasms taking the muscles in her face. She would have murdered an entire city for just a drop of blood.  
Beckett smiled his crooked smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.   
“Ah, but you see, that is without doubt the worst course of action you could have chosen. No answers just mean your captivity will continue. Now, if you were to give the right answers…”  
“Public execution!” she sang.  
“No, that would be the wrong answers. Think.”

She tried to think. Her head was a swamp of animalistic frenzy, the Beast looming closer every night, and anything sensible she could think of was immediately drowned by the voices in her head.  
“I can’t,” she groaned. She strained against the solid handcuffs like she had for days, but they were still not budging.  
“Everything is… H-hungry. We are all blood-filled skin sacs marching inevitably towards death. Or Florida. T-the rhythm, a thousand feet, heartbeats. Walking organic pumps. I hear them here, through the soil. I’m dying.”  
She closed her eyes to drown them out, but she could still feel the vibrations of the kine drumming overhead, talking loudly about nothing important, carrying their sweet nectar from place to place without a worry in the world. Juice boxes, all of them.   
Beckett was looking at his hands now, seemingly deep in thought. The smirk was gone. She couldn’t tell if he felt sorry for her or was just disgusted by her lack of control, but when he leaned forward to look directly at her, he spoke slowly and clearly.  
“Five questions. One word answers. Then I will see what I can do.”  
She nodded desperately. She had never considered Beckett a friend, but if her survival could further some of his studies, then she had hope.  
  
“Have you killed kine while feeding?”  
“Often.”  
“Accidentally?”  
“Always.”  
“Sired childer?”  
“No.”  
“Ghouls?”  
“Yes.”  
“Drained kindred to the point of death?”  
“Once.”

Then it was over. All her collective voices slowly died away, leaving a ringing, suffocating silence in her head. Beckett’s face found its usual smirk, as her face drained into empty shock.  
_No way. No fucking way_. Her secret, the last flames of Andrei, who she had kept so close to her heart…  
_You can’t be serious. Beaten by a rapid-fire round. Idiot._

He left her to her exasperation, but the door between them did nothing to hide his voice from her ears. She singled him out from the crowd surrounding the tower and heard him talking to one of the ghoulish guards upstairs.  
“And LaCroix?”  
“Prince is upstairs, talking to the primogen. No disturbances, sir.”  
“Too bad. Let’s hope he rewards you well for your tenacity. I will be leaving.”  
Steps right over her head.  
“Hey, hold up! I mean, wait a second. Sir. Did you get her talking?”  
“Oh yes, she’s positively spilling her heart out down there. She’s also starved beyond reason, so I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I don’t carry blood packs myself. Pity. She was babbling about the sarcophagus when I left her.”  
Silence. More steps. She could smell the greed of humans above her, and then…  
Iron and plastic.  
“Much appreciated,” Beckett said, and she could clearly hear the smile in his voice.

He found her completely still. Gone were the twitches and spasms, the uncontrollable mumbling and shifty eyes. She was a watching statue.  
“Now, looky here…” Beckett said softly. She knew what he had. The key to her mind was in the shape of a soft, squishy, plastic bag, clearly labeled and brimming with vitae. He produced a glass and set it between them, before poking a precise hole in the top of the bag and filling it up.  
The smell burnt her sinuses. The voices were screaming again, but they didn’t even try to form words anymore; the inside of her head was howling.  
Beckett shoved the crimson glass towards her and let it air.  
“I…” She began, her voice cracking like she had never used it before.  
“I can’t reach.”  
“Oh no, of course not. Let me.”  
Beckett stood, one smooth, gloved hand snapping her desire away from the table and lifting to her face. Shivering and slow, she opened her lips and tipped her head back as far as she could.  
_Get him. Unhinge your jaw like a snake and eat his hand. His arm. Swallow him whole. He’s so close.  
_ She didn’t move a muscle as the blessed nectar hit her tongue and ran down her throat. It seemingly evaporated on her insides, leaving her utterly unsatisfied.  
“Better?” Beckett asked. He had put the glass down, and he wasn’t filling it again.  
“No more?” she asked in return, feeling the catatonia that had grasped her earlier slip away.  
“I seem to have misplaced that bag. Unfortunate. While we wait for it to turn up, why don’t we have a little talk? Just you and me.”  
She felt the tiny amount of blood he had granted her seep through her flesh and into her skin, surging through her body and disappearing where it needed to be. So little, so late, it felt so much worse now. Yet, the voices were starting to make more sense.  
_Anything. Praise his name, pledge your allegiance to the jester, bend over backwards and shove your head so far up your ass you can whistle through your bellybutton. Anything. Anything he wants. He knows, he can feed you, it’s all up_ **. Anything.**  
“Answers.”  
“Yes, answers.” Beckett confirmed.  
“The right ones.”  
“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and let her other senses do the work. She heard a shuffling of paper, something heavy hitting the table, and the light scratching of a pen.  
“Tell me, are you the creative type?” the wolf said.  
The question caught her off guard.  
“Another life, perhaps. Before the colors of the wind slip-slopped off my dome. Right answer?”  
“Good. Then you won’t mind co-authoring a little story with me, would you? Purely fiction of course.”  
She could smell the cheap ink as his pen carved into paper. She imagined him taking notes in a massive leather-bound tome, but thinking about it, it made more sense for him to have a couple of smaller notebooks to take travelling.  
“… Okay?” she replied. Her eyes were still closed,  
“So, I already started this little story. Chapter one.” He cleared his throat dramatically.  
“An orphaned fledgling is taken in under the wings of the camarilla. She clears many trials, every one bigger and harder than the one before, but somehow this resourceful little malkavian always comes out on top.”  
“Pff, no one wants a malkavian protagonist!” she protested.  
“Unrelatable! Kooky loonies with sawdust in the membrane! Make her a toreador, everyone loves those high-class sissies.”  
She could hear the smile in his voice again as he continued.  
“As she rises through the ranks of her local vampire politics, this malkavian is tasked with wiping out the Sabbat influence in her town. She goes to their hiding place, and…”  
“And?”  
“I haven’t written any more than that. I figured you could help me, seeing as how this character is rather unpredictable, and so are you. What, hypothetically, happens at the Hollowbrook hotel?”

She let herself slip into her own memories. Hours, days, weeks flew by her, taking her to a point in time that seemed a hundred lifetimes away.  
“She’s weak. Too young for the task, terrified of the howling hordes, but the elevator takes her high, high, above the shining windows… Windows look so much like mirrors in the dark, wolf. If you dare face the possibility of something looking in through your reflection, you need only kill the light. She is not a plank of wood.”  
The construction lift had screeched to a halt on the roof. One, lonely Sabbat had stood there, and he was so easily dispatched she had felt her hopes soar. There was so much blood and noise on her way down.  
“She… Travels from top to bottom, destroying everything in her path.”  
“I thought you said she was weak?” Beckett shot in. His pen was still dancing.  
“Oh yes. Another fragile, porcelain victim of the summer breeze, and yet the Sabbat are nothing but a thousand buzzing mayflies. Her weakness is festering on the inside, their weakness lies in alarms and claws and blinded men, bland as water. They feed her dementation. Slow, creeping down, down, down… Down…”  
Her physical head was lolling from side to side, producing several satisfying cracks from her neck.  
She saw him. She felt him. His smell was in her pores now, his words in her ears. Such a beautiful horned crown. Gentle accent, round lips, black sclera framing his stunning orange eyes.  
Beckett had stopped writing. The silence between them was pregnant.  
“He…” she began, but found the words sticking in her throat.  
“T-the house was made of flesh. Rivers, troughs, swamps of blood. Bone and entrails. He could… Shape it, like clay. Stretching tendons and skin until it was snapping with unspent energy. Ah…”  
Desire welled in her heart, and to her great surprise she felt a single, red tear trickle down the bridge of her nose. She had not loved him then; only when he had become one with her did she feel the longing that now suffocated her. Thinking about him made her feel like she had lost limbs, the pulling at her heartstrings like phantom pain for a sire she had barely known. He had given her so much, changed and shaped her like he did his victims. He was still there, somewhere, buried in her chest and molding her body. She was sure of it.  
Letting her eyes flutter open, loosing another tear from her lashes, she saw the deeply concerned expression on Beckett’s face.  
“… What a disturbing, hypothetical image. Vicissitude, I believe you mean. Please continue.”  
She found herself shaking her head, the memory filling her brain until she thought she was going to explode. The gratification she felt from thinking of that dungeon, with its swimming pools of blood and endless buffet of flesh, was wrong. She could feel in some small part of her that it was wrong. She had never seen something more alluring.  
When she remembered the crucified man who had fueled her last, desperate disciplines she threw her head back in a futile attempt to physically shake the thought.  
“The man,” she gasped, her blood hunger aching worse than ever.  
“Split apart, lungs spread, on the wall. Centerpiece. I’m so hungry. There was nothing left, the malakvian had no guns so she was reliant on her disciplines, but no blind men had followed her to the dungeon. Oh, oh father, I’m sorry.”  
She was violently jerking her head from side to side. The slime and bile she had digested in the name of victory then was still clinging to her insides, scum on her vocal cords, and no amount of rose-colored glasses could change her memory. She would have done it again, but at the time, nothing had been worse. Nothing had been worse since either.  
“What did she do?” Beckett urged, his pen carving her story in his book.  
A sob escaped her.  
“A-ate him. Nothing else to do, that or death. If there is a god, it is a hateful and despicable creature. No, no…  The crucified man, his blood was thick, globules of power sticking to her hair. Horrible. Worst thing she had ever felt, worst thing she would ever feel. It worked. Corrupted her hands and smashed her teeth, but it worked. The fleshcrafter fell from his alternative skin, into the humanoid, alien form from before.”  
She stared at him and found him staring back. There was no crooked, knowing smile on his face now.  
“She tore into him, then. All hands and no resistance. No power can save you from yourself, wolf, and the lizard king wanted no part in life, just the gravedigging of others. The hunter became the hunted, the predator the prey. He was Sabbat and she was mad.”

They sat like that for a long time, staring, judging. She wished she could read Beckett like she could read everyone else, but she had barely enough blood to stay alive.  
“… And then they lived happily ever after.” She concluded.


	14. The accusations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave comments, they make me feel cool

After Beckett left and the word of her new willingness to cooperate reached the prince, she was given a little more freedom. They sent down a ghoul to feed her from a bag of blood, but he leaned too close and she tore his Adam’s apple out, and then those freedoms were taken away.  
_It was supposed to happen that way. He wants you to be a beast, so he can smear you._

The voices got louder the hungrier she grew. They seeped into her vision, filled her nose with strong and unpleasant smells, they ran their ghostly fingers over her brain and sent shivers into her soul. Every time she woke up they got a little stronger, to the point where they felt borderline corporeal. They were a physical and mental presence now.  
And they never shut up.

_Maggots loooove you (trust me)_  
_Try the free arsenic_  
_Floating wreckage in the night, trains go too fast, no?_  
_Shiny shiny gems_  
_Laaaadies and gentlemen, a new kind of mistake! This barely contained nuclear holocaust of a predator is bound, gagged and ripe for the taking! Call 1-800-KILLME for more information on how you (yes you!) can get your very own weirdo!_

Her hunger handicapped her. On some level she was still utilizing her supreme senses, having a general idea of what was happening above her at all times, but for every sip of blood she spent just staying alive those impressions got less reliable. She distinctly felt the prince in his ivory tower, several stories up, pacing and talking and planning, and yet she was surprised every time someone entered the basement. She once perfectly tracked a single human who stopped outside the tower, had a smoke, went inside, had a board meeting, had another smoke and then went home, but when Beckett stood before her again she screamed in surprise.  
  
“SNEAKY!” she shouted. The noise made them both reel back, although she couldn’t go very far.  
He held up his hands. Were there always eyes in his palms? Why wouldn’t they look at her?  
“Please. Calm down-“  
“Sorry!” She shouted again. She saw something twitch under his silky hair, probably an ear. Probably.  
“Sneaky wolfie, didn’t mean it, I know. She knows. Me being she. I am, and I knew, but I couldn’t hear or smell or see or feel you before right now. I saw a ladybug, not you. Is it spring?”  
His eyebrows threatened to disappear into his hairline, and she could smell the deep worry in him. With a hint of apprehension, he pulled out the chair he had sat in before and sank into it.  
“Fledgling, I will make this brief. I see the situation is worse than I thought.” Beckett said. He was trying to keep eye contact with her, but she found her head lolling about on its own accord.  
 “Give it to me straight, doc.” She replied with a voice that was perfectly sane and ordinary, despite her left eye having rolled up into her head two days ago, where it still refused to come down.  
Beckett cocked his head and brought his face close to the table, finally managing to catch her good eye. She felt something twitch beneath her left eyebrow.  
“There will be a trial. I believe you suspected as much. LaCroix has put out a story of how you betrayed him, painting himself as the victim, but a surprising number of people are still skeptical. Seems you made a few friends in the underworld while you were there?”  
The voices started singing the theme song of some sitcom in unison, and she was temporarily deafened.  
“Wha- wh- wha- SHUT UP! SHUT- Ok, ok, sorry. Not you. What do I stand- Ooooh my god. What did I do? What happ- Jesus Christ, no one told me life was gonna be this way, I GET IT.”  
Her words bubbled from her lips with varied intensity and volume, making her sound like a broken radio. To her surprise, she found a gloved hand on her chin, forcing her face up and keeping her steady.  
“Stay with me. The camarilla are playing dirty by starving you before your trial, I know, but you have to focus. You stand accused of being a double agent for the Sabbat, having infiltrated the tower and gained the trust of Lacroix, who claims you were like his own childe. He claims you helped spread the epidemic that ended shortly after your arrival downtown, helped peddle some gore tape that violated the masquerade in Hollywood, and even sold out one of your own to the Society of Leopold. One… Ash Rivers, I believe. All in the name of the Sabbat.”  
The information bounced around her head like a ping pong ball. With an impressive show of will, she pulled a question out of her mind and put it on the table.  
“… Not consumption?”  
“No,” Beckett confirmed.  
“You do not stand accused of diablere.”

She relaxed somewhat for the first time in ages, and to her extreme discomfort she felt her left eye roll back into position with a squelch, finally letting her see straight again. Beckett made a noise.  
“How?” she whispered. The voices had stopped saying actual words, and were instead banging on the inside of her ribs like heartbeats. _Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum_ , they chanted.  
“Ah, yes. Quite extraordinary, isn’t it? I saw for myself the note you so kindly left in the office, plainly stating your intentions of dibalerizing Sebastian Lacroix, Ming Xiao and Nines Rodriguez, after admitting having already “gobbled up” the vampire behind the Sabbat operation in L.A. Quite a piece of evidence. »  
“Evaporated milk, where’s it gone?” she asked.  
“That is quite a mystery, isn’t it? All I know is that our dear Sebastian no longer has it, and he doesn’t dare accuse you of one of the arguably worst crimes kine can commit without solid proof. As I said, you’ve made a lot of friends. Any idea who might have helped you?”

She wanted to answer, but her throat was filled with cotton. Instead she just stared at his bright eyes until his eyelashes started falling out and wiggling over his cheeks.  
“You… You got… Uh, worms. On yo’ face.”  
He touched his face, but his fingers went straight through the little black lines.  
“I know this is going to be hard for you. I cannot feed you, I’m afraid. I’m not even supposed to be here. Hold on to whatever sanity you have left and know that you have allies in the crowd. Tomorrow night you will be brought to the theatre, where you must defend yourself. Be as coherent as you can, plead your everlasting loyalty to your kind, and try not to mention your actual crimes. That is all the advice I can give you.”  
He stood, and it felt like the motion sucked all the air out of the room, making the vacuum in her stomach ache even more. She whispered her thanks and let her head fall again.  
“… One last thing, fledgling. I don’t believe I ever got your name.”

She closed her eyes and let the voices speak through her.  
“No name. Not here. There are many, many stars in this sky, tufts of silvery hair drifting across the voids, unclaimed by the legion of my skin. My pores are full of sand. I don’t believe in our rights as much as I do in our delusions, ya dig? Wolf, Jester, Nine, Damned sails and dolls all about, Janus on his technicolour throne. My titles ring the way they do because they fill that emptiness where names used to be.”  
The room was silent for a long time. Then, with a small sound of frustration, he wished her luck and left.

The night dragged on. She watched the table in front of her shift, bubble and melt away, only to stand up in the shape of a man with long fingers and a hat. The man blew away on a wind. She fell asleep, and woke up ten minutes later to discover that the table was still there.  
She was no stranger to hallucinations; she was just used to them being auditory.  
She let her mind fall back into the sewers. Her heart ached thinking about her servants, poor twisted Benjin and the child of her flesh, both aimless and sad now that she was gone. How long had it been? What were they doing? Could they defend the lair against adventurous nosferatu? There was no way Gary stop them if he thought she wasn’t coming back.  
Gary would be at the trial, she supposed. So would the doll, the two princes, the smiling one and his pirate crew, the onyx sister, the father of the phoenix and the primogen. Probably more kindred with titles she had forgotten, or who she hadn’t met yet. She wondered if they were as hungry for her ashes as the prince was, or if whatever defence she managed to spit out could move them.

The loudest voice in her head was currently yelling about bones in the chocolate and didn’t offer any help. Somewhere in the pudding of noise she could hear someone say “ _make me a martyr, Mr Gorbachev_ ” and “ _a secretary’s first job is to possibly die for her boss_ ” and “ _The father, son, holy ghost. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Turn up your nose, strike that pose, hey Macarena_!”, but none of that was useful.  
She listened to a very beautiful, feminine woman in her head speak some Scandinavian language for hours, not even noticing when the sun came up and she fell asleep.

After a long, long time, as her flesh grew grey and her twitches slowed down, they came for her. The Sheriff personally untied her from the chair she had been stuck in for weeks, and Sebastian LaCroix gave her cheek a little pat to wake her up.  
She didn’t.  
The pats got more insistent, and then outright violent, but her eyes remained closed. When the prince lifted an eyelid with his thumb, he saw nothing but white behind it.  
They wanted her weakened, but not comatose. There was no choice but to feed her.  
Precious, scarlet drops hit her tongue, and evaporated like absinthe. It took a lot to wake her up, and even more to make her speak.  
  
“Good evening.” The prince said, poorly veiled glee in his voice. She croaked in response.  
“The council has come to a conclusion, worm. You may think you have injured me with your little rebellion, but I am pleased to announce that you have not. In fact, we have decided to give you a trial. Like sire like childe, hm?” his pleased expression suddenly darkened.  
“Get her up. It’s time.”

She felt the massive hands of his bodyguard hoist her by the shoulders and force her to walk on her useless limbs, staggering and limping like a newborn babe. They seemed unconcerned with the possibility of frenzy, she noticed, not even bothering to stake her as they walked.  
  
“Y-you- ah, haha, you got something, sir, on your… H-huh, on your- there.” She mumbled, trying to gesture to her face with her shoulder. LaCroix put his hand to his cheek without thinking.  
“Nevermind. It’s just your face.” She said. And laughed. And the Sheriff hit her in the back of the head.  
“Very funny. We will see how amusing you find it when your head comes off, worm.” He sneered.  
The prince had his own driver, because of course had, despite the theatre just being around the corner. The heartbeats of Los Angeles had been driving her mad for weeks, but now they were all drowned out by her own voices.  
  
_Stay coherent, and know you have friends in the crowd._  
She could do that.


	15. The first accusation

_Stay with them._  
Her knees felt dead against the cold, wooden stage. Her eyelashes kept kissing her cheeks, her long, unwashed hair falling in clumps and tangles around her face. She pitied the antediluvians in their cold coffins, because now she knew their hunger. This hunger could devour worlds.  
_Stay here. This room is real._  
There were far more vampires in the audience now than there had been at her last visit to the theatre. That time they had been called on extremely short notice to witness the swift justice of the camarilla, but now the prince had advertised for days ahead to assure a proper crowd. She saw Velvet Velour, formerly known as Susan, with her porcelain face and magenta hair. She saw Therese Voerman, aka Jeanette, aka Tourette, impeccable as always with her smart business suit and carefully veiled madness.  
The anarchs made an impressive fraction, taking up a row on their own, Isaac Abrams radiating his calm defiance next to the obvious anger of his comrades. She remembered all their names. She saw all their faces in two dimensions, one purely factual representation of flesh, another twisted and reflected look into their true selves.  
She saw the tin crown on the head of Nines Rodriguez, very similar to the crown of the wizard king, Strauss. He had brought neonates she had never met before, but they sat behind him and the primogen, who also donned faces she didn’t know.  
_Don’t float. Don’t swim. Don’t fly. Stay grounded, anchor yourself, this is important._

The crucified man stretched a shivering hand towards her, but she had to resist looking at him. Andrei was whispering sweet things to her bones, but she had to close her ears to him. The fear of death was the only thing keeping her real.

Prince Sebastian LaCroix, resplendent in his jester’s garb, was patiently waiting for them all to settle down. They had been waiting for a while now, but still the undead shuffled through the doors, eagerly taking their places to witness her verdict. Even Gary Golden had brought a handful of his own to fill the very back row of chairs, but even in the shadows they stuck out. Ugly, twisted, cursed creatures. She loved them.

“My fellow kindred,” the jester said. His voice rang in the sudden silence of the cavernous room.  
She had gotten a good look at herself in the window of the car. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes bulging, her skin ashen and stretched from prolonged hunger. She couldn’t stop trembling. Would they pity her for it? Or think her weak, as she sat there inches from the beast within her?  
“I would apologize for disrupting any prior engagements you might have had this evening, but as I am sure you would all agree, this matter is a priority.”  
His expensive shoes click-clacked over to her. She closed her eyes and tried to control the shivers.  
_Stay coherent, stay sane, stay reasonable. Just fucking try, you waste of space._  
“As you know, the camarilla has not been an institution in this city for very long. Those of you native to this part of the country may never have seen a proper trial of kindred yet, and that, my friends, is a good thing. It pains me to have to call you here, but as prince it is my responsibility to be a voice of justice in my domain. The burden of judgement and punishment falls of my shoulders. Tonight, that judgement concerns one of our own.”  
She couldn’t see it, but she heard the unrest in the crowd. Whispers and murmurs blended in with those already in her head.  
“The woman you see before you were embraced barely two months ago, illegally, by a previous upstanding member of our organization. He was given the final death in the spot where she now kneels, but as she had committed no crime herself, she was allowed to live. I know many of you even know her personally, as she has been working for me ever since. That is… Until two weeks ago, when her treachery finally saw the light of day. She, cowardly, fled and hid, but was swiftly recaptured.”

The clicking of his shoes finally stopped, prompting her to open her eyes. The faces of the crowd had merged into a giant mass of uncertainty. She reached out to the voices and let them flood her mind with information.  
_They like you._  
_You couldn’t have done it._  
_Innocence died screaming._  
 _VV loves you._  
 _They hate him so, so much._  
 _Poor little thing. Trembling itty bitty bird, on a tree of molten gold, burning your beak on your own words._  
 _Speak carefully._  
 _Stay with them._  
 _The pawn reaches the other end of the table. What is it now?_  
“She stands before you now, accused of the lowest crimes imaginable.”  
His voice was genuinely angry. She could smell his smug little sneer.  
  
“She has aided the Sabbat in spreading disease downtown, peddling a disgusting snuff tape that violates the masquerade in Hollywood, extend their influence to Santa Monica, and even sold out on of our own to the dangerous society of vampire hunters known as The Society of Leopold.”

There it was. Short and sweet, but it still drew a collective reaction from the audience. She met Isaac Abram’s eyes without flinching, and shook her head. He gave no reaction.  
In the ocean of murmurs she could hear VV’s sad voice.  
“But- she helped me. She drove the hunters out of my club. Ash’s club too!”  
“don’t add up,” another voice said.  
“Then kill her!” someone yelled.  
“No way. No fucking way.”  
“Could she? I mean…?”  
“The Sabbat are gone!” someone shouted, safely hidden in the darkness. Maybe she could survive this after all.

“Please, have patience!” the prince called, and the voices slowly faltered, leaving only a couple of scared whispers.  
“Traditionally, the judgement of the prince has been enough. Yet, we know that undeath is wasted on those who cannot adapt, and the plights of this community is more important to us than mere traditions. Therefore, I have decided to give this kindred a chance to defend herself. Let no one leave this room tonight with doubts in their mind; I will not preach her guilt, I will prove it.”  
That made them quiet.  
_A smart move, not to flaunt power he doesn’t have. Stay coherent._

All eyes were on her now. She slowly, carefully, picked the words that seemed reasonable before opening her mouth.  
  
“Good show. I’m captivated.”  
Her voice was small and shaking, but she didn’t dare raise it in case it broke completely. She sounded so weak she wanted to hit herself.  
“Here I am, posterchild of camarilla benevolence, starved, tortured, bound but not gagged.”  
_Right answer._  
Someone mumbled “I fucking knew it” in the crowd, maybe one of the anarchs, and she could practically hear poor Velvet Velour’s heart break. The prince huffed in indignation.  
“Tortured? Your captivity has-“  
“I’ve known no nurture for weeks!” she interrupted. Yep, there it was, her voice broke with a weird cracking noise and forced a cough out of her. Before he could speak she looked straight at the unified blur that was the crowd.  
“Look at me!”

They did look at her. Velvet with her hand on her chest, Nines with his teeth bared, Strauss with a face of stone. She threw her hair behind her shoulder to expose her sunken skin and prominent collarbones, just in case anyone didn’t believe she was weakened.  
“I have been your circus freak since bloody, deadly birth. I eradicated the wretched Sabbat flying your flag, I retrieved the fallen phoenix from his cage in the monastery, and the tape that plagued the streets of smoke-tricks and mirrors burned by my fire. Your lies were grown in Eden, but here they fall on dead ears.”  
_Right answer._

The crowd couldn’t help themselves; a wave of whispers, like wind blowing over tall grass, hit the stage.  
“Phoenix? What?”  
“What monastery?”  
“She’s out of her mind.”  
“He’s lying.”  
The prince put his chin up to seem taller, puffing out his already puffed chest, cold eyes piercing the crowd without much effect.  
“Oooh, very good,” he taunted.  
“I am sure that would have been quite a speech, if you knew reality from fiction. Eden, circuses, smoke-tricks and mirrors indeed. Am I to believe you are denying the accusations?”  
“Yes.” She spat.  
“Very well. Let’s start from the top, hmm? Silence, if I may ask.”  
The crowd settled down.  
“The very night after your embrace, you were sent to Santa Monica to meet up with an agent. Your mission was to plant explosives in a warehouse under Sabbat control.”  
“I did!” she burst.  
“Oh yes, the warehouse was blown up. However, I cannot be the only one who thinks it is a bit suspicious how there were no actual Sabbat vampires present at the time of demolition.”  
“There was!”  
“There was not. When the camarilla sent in agents to clean up any trace of kindred involvement before the human police arrived, there was also a disturbing lack of the weapon shipments the warehouse was known to contain in the wreckage. Leading me to believe that it was moved, and evacuated, before the building went up. Someone tipped the Sabbat off.”

Her head was screaming. She had been there, she had seen the weapons and people, fought the Sabbat, and now he was claiming none of it had been there? Her rolling eyes found Bertram Tung in the crowd, sitting suspiciously close to Therese Voerman, both wearing sneers of disbelief. They knew the truth. So did Beckett, but if he was there she couldn’t see him.  
“Wh- huh- I’m-…”  
Her voice faltered, the hunger she had barely kept at bay was seeping into her tongue and obstructing her speech.  
_Stay with them. Stay grounded._  
“A trick with two tongues!” she hissed.  
“If the camarilla cannot see what the long arm of the law saw, then your eyes are blinder than my tummy is empty. Turn on the tellybox _right now_ , and the news man will tell you there were an abundance of weapons recovered. Lies, all lies, you two-faced controlling conversator.”  
She locked eyes with Bertram Tung and saw him jerk in surprise. She didn’t have enough blood to look past his membrane and into his soul, but maybe if she could coax him out of his little safe space, he could confirm her story. He had been scoping out the place right up to the point where it disappeared. He knew.  
Bertram made a real effort to look away, but when he finally managed to force his head to the right he found himself staring right at Therese, who was still scowling. The others on the row had also noticed her stare, and some people even turned around to look at him.  
“You call me a liar?” prince LaCroix said. Some turned their gaze to him, but not everyone. Tung looked extremely uncomfortable.  
“The police force did not, in fact, find an abundance of anything. They found what the camarilla had placed there, to make the warehouse seem like a drug ring. And since you are the only one to visit the warehouse before its demise, it seems obvious…”  
  
A cold, loud, and logical voice broke in. All heads turned to face Therese Voerman.  
“Actually, sir, if I may…”  
She looked relaxed and dignified where she sat. She spoke calmly, her eyes were on the prince, like she had nothing to fear in the whole world.  
“She was not the only one. I personally assisted this kindred to find Bertram Tung, the nosferatu beside me, as he had been gathering intel on the place for you. I believe he saw the warehouse barely an hour before the explosion. I would be interested in hearing what he has to say.”  
Poor Tung had obviously not expected to be called to the witness stand. A grave silence fell as several, glowing, predatory stares fell on him, the whole crowd holding its metaphorical breath.  
“… Of course.” LaCroix replied. His voice was as cold as Therese’s.

Bertram straightened his collar.  
“Uh… Yeah. I did. I watched the warehouse for a good while. I even took her through the sewers to find it, ‘cause you couldn’t exactly walk through the front door of that place.” _  
_ She observed with glee as LaCroix’s lips tightened.  
“… And? Spit it out.”  
The nosferatu swallowed hard.  
“I mean… The place was full of kine. They knew who they were working for though. Guessing most of them had aspirations of joining the next graduation class of shovel heads. Not a lot of… Uh, actual vampires, but there were a few. Definitely weapons. A new shipment had come through by train when we arrived. I’d say that building was a Sabbat hotspot before it went up, if you take my word on it.”  
_Right answer._


	16. The verdict

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're reading this really long and disconnected fic i want to personally thank you and offer you a place to stay if you ever need one. kiss kiss

The prince could say what he wanted, but she had cleared the first trial. As he grilled poor Tung on exactly when, how and why he had been at the warehouse, she noticed the audience becoming restless, agitated by this new evidence.  
The warehouse had been under Sabbat control, and she had blown it up, weapons and all.

“Perhaps…” The prince said, his cold eyes flitting over his fellow vampires.  
“Perhaps there was a misjudgement. Not that it matters. You are still suspected playing plague bearer in my domain, helping the Sabbat spread disease amongst the lowlife of the town.”  
His voice had lost the stone hard conviction he had begun this trial with. She rolled her head around and looked straight into the eyes of Maximillian Strauss. Several seats behind him Damsel sat, seething with barely contained rage.  
She had friends in the crowd.  
  
“After your mission in Santa Monica had been completed, you reported to me in my haven. There you mentioned having “noticed” the kindred-borne disease that was threatening the masquerade, and you offered to look into it. From there, and I know this for a fact, you visited two apartments in the Skyline apartment complex. Both inhabitants were found dead moments later. So were three homeless kine, known disease carriers. After you were seen entering the Empire Arms Hotel, one Jezebel Locke, an escort suspected of using her profession to spread the sickness amongst kine, disappeared from her room. She has not been heard of again.”  
Sebastian LaCroix’s impeccable shoes came to a halt right next to her, and she saw him straighten his back and put his hands behind it. He was back on track.  
“Do you expect me to believe that it is mere coincidence? The sickness spread everywhere you went, until you tipped off one of your allies and she disappeared.”  
The hunger was debilitating. She couldn’t help it. A deep, barely audible groan escaped her, the kind that rattled her chest and chattered her teeth. When she got out of here she was going to take a- no two- no, _three_ people down the closest manhole and devour them whole. The image of the crucified man haunted her. She was just a couple of blocks away from the cellar where she ended Andrei’s life, where the floor ran red with blood and the walls pulsed like living flesh…  
She barely managed to choke down another groan.  
  
_Stay, staaaaay, stay put and coherent and nice, you wild animal. This is important. You’ll die._

“I visited the apartments-“ her voice crackled. Goddamn.  
“They did not meet the maker by my claws. They fell like flies to the toxins in their blood. The… The brotherhood of the ninth circle, holed up in the alley by the last round. They were the source. They were vanquished. The wizard knows.”  
“Wizard?” LaCroix repeated with a chuckle.  
“Him! Him of the iron crown! Fucking- that guy, right there!” She nodded her head aggressively towards Strauss, who was sitting right in front of her in the closest row.  
Strauss was polishing his glasses with his sleeve. He looked like a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and when he spoke, his voice reflected that.

“I have already given my statement to the prince before this trial. He has considered it when accusing you, I am sure.”  
  
“The camarillan inquisition strikes again!” she blurted. There had been murmuring amongst the people watching for a while now, and it got louder.  
“Tell it again! Let no one leave this room tonight with doubts in their mind; he will not only proclaim my guilt, he will prove it! Yes?”  
Her neck cracked when she tore her head around to stare the prince down. His face was calm and collected, but he had clenched both hands into fists.  
Strauss looked up from his glasses.  
“… Very well. Let me tell you what I told him. After we met for the first time after your arrival downtown, I was the one to tell you about the sickness currently spreading through the streets. I told you I suspected kindred involvement, and asked you to go to the anarchs to seek information. You did, as I am sure they can testify. With their help you tracked down two major bearers: Jezebel Locke and a nosferatu only known as “brother Kanker”. Both lead you to the headquarters of a cult calling themselves “the brotherhood of the ninth circle”. According to yourself you discovered several disease-ridden kine within and disposed of their leader, a man calling himself “bishop”, leading me to believe this sect might be an offshoot of the Sabbat. I have since revisited the location myself and found no proof to the contrary. That is my testament.”

Strauss and LaCroix had a stare-battle for a while afterwards, and the silence allowed more whispers to rise from the vampires gathered.  
“He’s lying.”  
“No way.”  
“She’s gonna frenzy, mate.”  
“Oh my god-“  
“This is such bullshit.”  
“Get her off the streets! Goddamn!”  
“Locke?”  
“What makes him a wizard anyway?”  
“What a shitshow.”  
“Quiet!” LaCroix called, but not everyone listened. His stupid sweaty hands were losing their grip on the audience, and that could only mean bad things. His stupid face was sneering a stupid sneer, baring his stupid, flawless teeth. Stupid.

_Two down, one to go, c’mon buddy. We got this. Afterwards we’ll celebrate with a public vivisection and a milkshake._

“No matter, no matter,” LaCroix said loudly.  
“Those two accusations, if true, pale in comparison to your greatest crime. While in Hollywood under my orders, you were not only in possession of a disgusting, perverted tape that clearly violated the masquerade, but you also made contact with the society of Leopold. What-“  
The hunger roared within her. Words she couldn’t control boiled up within her, spewing from her mouth like she was trying to drown the room with them. She spoke.  
  
“Yadda-yadda-yadda! Here I kneel, and here are my words! **Don’t bother slithering your lies into our ears**. Since my death I have wiped out the Sabbat influence in this town, I have marched through the Society of Leopold that threatened the doll and the phoenix in their clubs **like a fucking one-man army** , I have rid the sewers of the twisted fleshy children of the Tzimisce, **completely _annihilated_ the Giovanni in their stronghold** ,”  
She drew a dramatic breath, even though she didn’t need it.  
“not to fucking mention all I went through to secure that dusty old box for you. Tip-toing around the Elizabeth Dane and the museum. I killed a gargoyle, I killed the pope- Whatshisface, Grünfeld Bach, nuked the production company responsible for that terrible tape, and what was that last bit? Hm? My final accusation? **Oh, right, YOU say I sold out Rivers, when I say I rescued him from the cages they burnt him in!** ”  
Her voice was morphing, switching between eerily childlike and distressingly desperate. The hunger was screaming in her bones. She needed this to end, right now, or the two paths ahead were frenzy and torpor.  
“ **I have serviced literal floodgates of blood for you, and this is my thanks? You have heard the truth, straight from the starving, icky-gooey wound of my mouth, and whatever you say it will be false. I have left broad brick roads of corpses behind me. Ask Bruno Giovanni if I’m loyal to my kind, and he won’t answer, because he’s dead and all of his friends are dead. Ask the Sabbat, ask the hunters, they’re all dead. I’m dead too. This is desecration, you’re smearing my grave!** ”

LaCroix had been trying to interrupt her all the while, but her voice just rose, and rose, and rose, until it pushed all the oxygen out of the room and occupied the void. A chorus of responses had risen from the seats beneath her, some had even gotten to their feet.

“ **Here I am, posterchild of camarilla benevolence, bound but not gagged!** ” she shouted at no one. The door slammed as a couple of the smarter vampires left in a hurry, foreseeing the trouble that would soon arise. Several of the primogen had taken the stage, whispering urgent messages to the prince that was struggling just to be heard.  
The anarchs were standing, even the collected Isaac Abrams, and when she locked eyes with Smiling Jack he gave her two thumbs up. The Sheriff was gripping the entire top of her head with his massive hand. His sword glittered under the stagelights.

In the end, it was Strauss, not LaCroix, that forced order amongst the kindred. With one hand and centuries of forbidden Tremere knowledge he made the ceiling explode in green light, showering everyone present in a deep, suffocating silence. Through the thick veil of magic only his voice sounded.  
  
“The council will meet, and the fate of this childe will be decided. Please exit the area.”


	17. The beast

“I told you-“  
“I know what you told me!”

_Their voices were far away. Inside her, the beast was slowly shuffling to life._

“The camarilla must present a unified front. The people want results. I need not remind you, sir, that our foothold in this city is already shaky at best.”

_She could see it in her mind’s eye. Tall and short, broad and thin, a hundred thousand eyes fixed to a hundred thousand faces._

“Where did you even get that idea?”  
“Please, my prince...”

_She was in a cell, closing rapidly around her, iron bars thickening and pulsing to seal her away. Through the bars she felt it; looming, massive, an unending well of pure power. She just needed to reach out and take one of its many hands, and they could soar together._

“Obviously. The last thing we need is a martyr for the anarchs to cling to.”  
“Why did you testify against us? Do your loyalties run so shallow?”  
“Do not try to imply that I am not as devoted to our cause as you are. You had already lost the crowd.”

 _It was pressing against the bars, bulging between them to meet her palm, but at the last moment she pulled away. Why had it not taken her yet? Where was the frenzy Jack had promised her? It just stood, vibrating silently in the empty void of her brain. A presence to be felt, not touched._  
_She could. If she wanted._  
 _Did she?_

“Bruno Giovanni was a pest, only allowed to live because killing him would be too costly. She did us a favour.”  
“With all due respect, she did you a lot of favours, boss.”  
“Us. She did us a lot of favours, Gary. Don’t try to distance the nosferatu from this.”

 _It was hungry too. It had been hungry for millennia, stowed away inside the minds of every vampire on the globe. The Sabbat claimed to know it well, but they couldn’t. Not like she did. One, quivering mental finger reached out, pushing against the firm, pitch black boundaries of its ethereal body. It could swallow her, and she could ride the wave to extinction. Or she could just… Wake up. Push it away. Embrace the starvation and cling to her humanity._  
_It promised her never-ending rivers of blood. As many bodies as her spiky little hands could tear. She was a knife made of flesh, the result of millennia of finely tuned biological engineering and forbidden magic. She carried the curse of Caine, and in return, Caine carried her burdens. The beast had a million voices, but so did she._  
 _The Network was buzzing to her._

“How? How do we come back?”  
“A pardon. Maybe honesty is the key here, friend.”  
“If we get her on our side, she is a ridiculous asset. What was it you called her?”  
“A guard dog.”  
“Right.”  
“Ladies and gentlemen, as crude as it sounds, she could make a new asylum. Grout is dead and his clan is aimless. Give her that building by the overpass, let her fill it with whatever freaks she picks up-“  
“Maro! She is NOT joining the council! She’s a couple of months old!”  
“I know that! I’m not saying she needs to be equal to us, just higher than she is now. Throw her a bone. An enemy with nothing to lose is the most dangerous kind. Make her a friend, and give her something she wants to keep. It could be that simple.”

 _She felt the pain of an old infection in her hand. Pain was real, something physical and unmistakable, and she held it to her heart._  
_The cage was closing. The beast was watching. Now was her chance; take the plunge and become a bloody god, a wind of pain and death, or don’t. She could feast until the sun came up. Or not._  
_What was her name?_

“is it decided?”  
“It is decided.”


	18. The results are in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tryna get back into that violence. I also hope I did Jack justice

She was different when she woke up. She had not given in to the beast, but the beast had given in to her, and now she could feel it breathing down her neck.

A warm, squirming body fell into her lap. She acted without thinking. Too eager, too strong, too hungry, she grabbed the person by the hair and wrestled their fragile frame into the ground, all teeth and claws. Her jaw closed around its neck like a bear trap- and then her mouth filled with flesh and blood.  
She thought of Pisha, who had to consume all parts of the human to feel alive. When she tore out the jugular, she had half a mind to swallow it.  
She didn’t.  
She just drank, and drank, and drank until she was sucking on a dry artery. It was euphoric. A satisfaction that sex never brought her in life, and still it wasn’t enough.  
Maybe it would never be enough anymore.

“Kid, I’m gonna be honest, that’s fucking nasty.”  
Jack’s voice sounded, and suddenly the entire world smashed her in the face. With a shout she got up from the metal floor, scurrying back, head swirling around to take in her surroundings.  
This place was familiar. She could remember being here before everything went to shit, but back then there had been a terrified hobo and a headless corpse hanging from the ceiling. This was the abandoned building across from The Last Round. It was still cold and hard, and still very much a crime scene, but at least she knew it.  
In front of her there was Smiling Jack. Between them, mangled on the floor, the remains of a decapitated man lay.  
  
“Hey- Woo there girl, it’s okay. You’re safe.” Jack sounded like an angel.  
“What? Where? Who and why?” She did not.  
“That’s a whole bunch of questions, kiddo. Wanna try that again?”  
“I… W-was it a dream?”  
“Nope. All real. You remember the trial?”  
“I do.”  
“Well, that was a great fucking show, kid. Gotta give you that. You sure know how to piss off all the right people!” he grinned, and those familiar, yellow teeth gave her comfort.  
“… Then… Then what was it?” she asked.  
“Oh man, you’re gonna love this.”  
He laughed again.  
“All right, so after they made us all fuck off with that green shit, Nines got busy freaking out. Talking ‘bout sneaking back in, grabbing you and reigniting the war or something. LaCroix’s “proof” was a shitshow, so he wasn’t alone about it, either. Damsel was this close-“ Jack held up two fingers- “to smashing a window and gutting them with the glass. Good thing Isaac was there, or I might have joined. I mean, that little speech of yours? Oho, that was a real Firestarter! “posterchild of Camarilla benevolence” my ass. You have a way with words, kid, even if you’re fucked in the head.”  
She sat down on the floor. Jack got one of the many, empty wooden boxes and sat on that.  
“so anyway- Isaac is telling everyone you’re in the clear. No fucking way they are gonna take you behind the shed after that. He was kinda happy too- about Ash being alive and all. I think he liked you already, but that cemented it. So he sends a couple of us to the back, we’re covering every exit in case you come out. Even some of the camarilla small-fry join us! A lot of them pissed themselves just seeing you up there.” His laughter died down, leaving a concerned, uncle-like smile.  
“Uh, no offense, but you look terrible. It’s… It’s bad, being near other kindred when they’re starving. It’s like you can feel it yourself. Kinda itches in the old bones, get it? You were fucking inches away from letting the beast in through the back door, and that’s really bad for business. You pulled through though. Proud of ya.”  
She rested her eyes on the corpse in front of them. Jack slapped her on the shoulder.  
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up over it.  Humans die some times. Been a while since I’ve seen someone use their fangs as a guillotine!”  
“Tell me the story,” she sighed. She crossed her legs and leaned forward, stretching out her aching back. The metal felt cool against her forehead.  
“Right on. Me and Skelter’s watching the back entrance, but it’s been a while, so he goes to the front to see if you came out that way, right? The second he’s around the corner the door just flies open. There you are, completely in la-la land, and guess who’s carrying you? King tremere himself! Whatcha call him- wizard with a crown or something?”  
“Iron crown,” she corrected.  
“Yeah, that. I’m getting ready to fight if I have to, but then he just puts you right on the ground, dainty as fuck. Tells me an official statement is gonna go out soon, but all I need to know right now is that you’re spared, you can stay here for a while and you seriously need to eat.”  
“That’s it?”  
“Right?! Then he just fucking closes the door, like he’s done his job. I didn’t fucking sign up to babysit, but I wasn’t about to let you wake up and eat half of Los Angeles either, so I do it. I take you to the rest, Nines calms down a bit, and while they’re discussing what to have for dinner or whatever I brought you here. That guy-“ Jack pointed to the dead man “-said he was a backpacker. Going to the big apple. Saw me coming in and asked if he could crash on the couch.”  
They laughed together that time.

Jack patted down the pockets on his denim vest, producing a small, metal case, which he flipped open to reveal a row of cigars. Most of them were half-burned already. He took one, and offered the case to her.  
She politely declined.  
“Do your blood still ache for such things?” she asked, watching him roll it over the flame of a zippo, until the end glowed an even red.  
“Nah. We don’t really feel smoke and drink like we used to. By this point I’m guessin’ it’s a mental thing, but who cares?”  
“Makes you look cool.” She commented. Jack seemed to have an endless supply of laughs today. He had that rough, gravel-like voice that a long life of whisky and tobacco brought, and she liked it. He was also the only vampire she had met who didn’t try to lecture or recruit her, or send her on errands, or influence her in any way. She liked that too.  
  
“… Thank you, captain.” She said after a comfortable silence.  
“Don’t mention it. Also, I’m not a captain.”  
“True. You were crew once, weren’t you?”  
He looked at her, still smiling, but his eyes were narrowed.  
“Right on. Someone talking shit about me or is it just some of that good ol’ malakvian insight?”  
“I don’t know. There’s a city of shadows yelling in my ears when I meet people, but not with you. With you, the voices just… Laugh. They laugh and laugh and laugh. You’ll end the world one day. I see a fire with the moon on her by birth. You saw her too, and you killed her, so in return she killed us all. It’s right. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”  
He took a long drag, letting her words settle between them.  
“You, uh… You see a lot of shit like that?”  
“Everything has a story, and I have a lot of ears to listen. If I want to I can drink people like juice, and see what they saw long ago.”  
“Righteous. Anything interesting?”  
“The Sheriff ate his way out of the husk of a massive bat. He took its wings and its teeth and stopped eating pomegranates forever. Golden had a bad noseache while alive, and I spoke with a porcelain person who used to be Susan, but now she’s not.”  
“That makes sense.”  
“You’re being sarcastic.”  
“Hah! Now there’s some insight!”

He left before sunrise, letting her explore her temporary home. It seemed to have been used as a warehouse once upon a time. The upper floor had collapsed, leaving massive concrete slabs all over the floor, dangerous pieces of rebar sticking out to gouge anyone unlucky enough to fall on it. She didn’t mind the mess, or the rusted garage doors all along the wall, she didn’t even mind all the cloudy windows on the upper floor. That could all be fixed. The most pressing issue was the fact that the warehouse had absolutely no ceiling. As much as she loved staring up at the starry, violet sky, that would be a problem once the sun came up.  
A large piece of floor was leaning against the wall, creating a kind of shelter, and behind it she found several blankets and empty bottles. Some of the local homeless must have made their home here before her. No matter.  
She found a crate as big as her and pried it open. It was empty, except for a dead rat, and when she shoved the blankets in there to make a kind of nest it was almost cosy.  
It would have to do for the day.  
She crawled in, secured the lid on top of her, and nestled up amongst the stinking, stiff bedding. There was enough space to curl up comfortably.

She fell asleep to the crackling of a barrel fire.

 _She had followed him into a small cafè by the train station, and when he entered the mens room, she followed. The borrowed hoodie let her hide her face. There was an old fashioned glass stall by the door, where an grey-haired gentleman sat reading a magazine. He wouldn’t have stopped her even if he saw her._  
_She had been much bigger back then. The bulging muscles on her arms were not quite hidden by her baggy clothes, filthy sweatpants covered thighs that ran a 2:24 at her last marathon, ending in sneakers that were beaten flat by daily jogs. She was tall for a woman as well, and her face just gaunt enough to be considered androgynous when she pulled her hair back._  
_Her hair was the most telling thing when it came to her gender. She spent half an hour pinning it up and back before runs, but she couldn’t bring herself to cut it. It was waist long, thick and curly, falling in curvaceous, dark-brown locks down her back. Her voice too. Flat and tired most of the time, but tellingly feminine regardless._  
_The bathroom was sectioned into three, the first part with mirrors and sinks, the second with urinals, and the third with stalls. Her target picked a urinal by the back wall._  
_There was only one other guy there, so she walked casually to the urinal farthest away from him while waiting for him to finish, pulling down her pants and putting her hands over her crotch to pretend to be pissing. As soon as he left, she approached the target from behind and put a hard hand over his mouth, shoving her gun into the soft flesh beneath his jaw. He didn’t struggle when she pulled him backwards and into the stall directly behind them._  
_He fell onto his knees by the toilet when she locked the door, and made a weak attempt to stand up before she punched him in the head. He made a noise. She put the gun to his forehead._  
_“Not a sound.”_  
_“C’mon- Wait-“_  
_She saw the confusion in his eyes when she spoke, but before he could comment on it, she had planted her knuckles into his stomach. Confusion was replaced by fear._  
_“Turn around, back against me.”_  
_“Please man, don’t do this.”_  
_“Shut up.”_  
_With the air of a man who had been raped before, he slowly, shivering, turned around on his knees and rested his head on the toilet seat. She pulled his jacket to his elbows._  
_From her backpack she produced a rag and a roll of duct tape. She secured the tape around his wrists, shoved the rag between his teeth, and wrapped some more tape around his head two or three times. Then she pulled him up and placed him on the seat._  
_His foot came out and connected with her shin. He tried to worm around her, but she was larger than him, and she managed to crack his nose with the butt of her gun. He stopped struggling._  
_She pressed their bodies together, shoving her firearm into his soft gut, and waited. No one came to investigate the ruckus. All they heard was a toilet being flushed, and the ragged, terrified breathing of her victim._  
_She hadn’t gotten a good look at him before choosing. He was just there, another face in the ocean of faces, a walking sack of meat and blood waiting for someone to release it from the eternal damnation of life. He was handsome, she supposed. Thin, agile, with a ratty face underneath all that tape and blood. He was dressed almost like a priest in his black suit, a pristine white collar visible underneath his defined chin. She didn’t know his name. She barely knew her own._  
_If her house wasn’t currently swarming with police, she could have taken her time with him. He had such large, pleading eyes… Full of life, begging to be gouged and eaten._  
_But she couldn’t. They were on a time crunch._

 _She hit him. Twice in the stomach, once in the face, the thuds made soft by her thick gloves. Every noise she made increased the chance of discovery, but that only made it more fun._  
_The egg salad sandwich she had for lunch was making its way up again. She hadn’t slept in so long, travelling under the sun and the moon alike, hopping from train to train under the noses of local law enforcement. Killing was the only luxury she had left._  
_She hit him again. Again. Pleasure shot through her arm with every impact. She remembered her gloves growing red, his muffled screams dying down, that pretty little face growing obscure and ugly. There was a dark cloud in her brain. Under it, she felt nothing._

 _When she stopped, his face was a stew of red and white. She buried her fingers in his jacket, pressing her face against his chest, and cuddled up to his soon-to-be corpse as she listened to his frantic heartbeats._  
_His body tightened. He spasmed once, twice. Thick, black blood was running from his nose, mouth and ears when he died._

 _She took a small step back and noticed her own laboured breathing. She wiped down her face and shirt with some toilet paper, even though the drops were barely visible against the black fabric, took her gloves off and stashed them in her backpack, before flushing the toilet and exiting the stall._  
_A quick look around revealed nothing new. Beneath her feet, a long, red snake of blood was slithering between the tiles. The man in the glass stall had his face hidden by his magazine._  
_The sounds of death must have ricocheted between the walls, but he was a sensible sort and decided not to meddle in her affairs._

 _As she briskly made her way towards an empty platform, she heard the pounding of boots. Two policemen shot past her and into the bathroom door. Someone must have heard and been less polite about it._  
_She hoisted her baggage up further and wormed between some empty busses._

 _“In the next life, we are judged,” someone had told her._  
_“In this life, we only have laws.”_  
_That was wrong. Every killer knew that was wrong. In the last moments of your life there are no laws, only brutal punishment by the hands of your fellow man._

 _Just as the random train she hopped on whistled and moved_ , a vampire woke up somewhere in downtown LA, the dream she had been dreaming already slipping from her mind.


	19. The Camarilla graveyard

The Camarilla graveyard was a large, seemingly empty stretch of land east of Santa Monica.  
  
The land was flat and waterlogged, bought up by a corporation that had promised a giant shopping mall for the handful of locals nearby. Concrete foundation stretched like an open wound across the land, adorned by steel beams connecting to nothing, barely upholding the glorious, off-white walls that reached for the sky like there was still hope for their completion. Giant holes meant to house equally giant glass panes let the waning sun in, where it spilled across exposed pipes, non-functional air conditioning, and filthy, halfway-tiled floors.  
The corporation had abandoned the project halfway. What could have been a lush, modern shopping mall in the middle of nowhere was now just another corpse. A monument to capitalism.   
Teenagers looking for a place to drink far away from their parents sometimes congregated there, leaving cigarette butts and crudely painted pictures of various genitals in their wake.   
A local street artist had once managed to decorate the entire left side with a rather beautiful rendition of the aurora borealis, prompting tourists and locals alike to come take pictures, but ambitious assholes had quickly tagged their own marks over his artwork, leaving it nothing but a mangled mess of colour.  
The property had changed hands often, but the new owners and their wild ideas never really reached it. The unfinished mall stood as it had stood since the seventies; empty, sturdy, massive. As of November 2004, the land belonged to someone, who belonged to someone else, who worked under a corporation that worked under one of LaCroix’s many businesses, wrapping the whole thing in a neat, Camarilla barbed-wire bow.  
Sometimes, in the dead of night, creatures would surface from the manhole nearby. They always came in pairs, always carrying black plastic bags, and they always left as silently as they came.

_Make her a friend, give her something she wants to keep. It can be that simple._

She could hear them whisper when they thought she wasn’t listening. Guard dog, they called her, sometimes just dog for short. To her face they called her “malk”.   
She had been slowly allowed back into the cold, suffocating embrace of vampire society after the prince had botched her trial a week earlier, and yesterday he had even agreed to meet her under the condition that she shower first.  
He had been shockingly polite. Charming, even. He didn’t let his anger show at all during their short conversation, and seemed more than happy to let her see the graveyard before her first mission post-rebellion.  
That was why she was there now.  
Behind her, two ventrue youths climbed uncomfortably out of the sewers, brushing off their suspicious black coats and exchanging nervous glances. One of them had been there for her trial, the other had been embraced a couple of days ago.  
They were both afraid of her.

She pointed at the colossal building.  
“Is it sleeping?” she asked.  
Neither of them answered. She started walking anyway, and they followed closely, the newest of them wielding his flashlight like a pistol. He looked extremely uncomfortable when she slowed down to walk beside him.  
“Hello!” she told him. He looked at his partner for help, but the other ventrue seemed extremely interested in something far away.  
She put her hand on his shoulder and felt him tense.  
“Don’t be scared, buddy! I’m on a leash tonight! First mission?”  
“Uh- yeah. I’m… New.”  
“Oh, I know! I can smell the last strands of life leaving your skin as we speak!”  
“Hu-what?”  
“Fresh,” she pronounced the word like a weapon, letting it linger between them until she saw his pupils dilate in fear.  
“Meat.” She concluded.  
Then she jumped ahead of them and pointed again.  
“Unlike the unlucky fuckers who live there! Who were they?”  
The oldest of her ventrue companions, a handsome man with dirty blonde hair, shrugged.  
“Undesirables. Does it matter?”  
“Oooh! Un-de-sirables! I’m one of those! It’s his grave, though, not mine. Hah!”  
She spun on her heels, facing them for a second, before tripping backwards and falling on her ass into the wet soil beneath them. A second later she was back on her feet and rolling full steam ahead towards the unfinished structure.

The three of them fell quiet as they entered.  
The mall was ruined and derelict, but still oddly vibrant with life. Most of the tiles on the floor had been pried up, and the massive hole at the top of the three-story structure let the rain in, allowing a strange oasis of grass and ferns to spring up in the very middle. Around the oasis stood the remains of what could have been a food court, consisting of waist-high walls coloured by mould, flaking red paint and the carved names of whoever had explored this place.  
Above them they could clearly see the concrete walkways of the second floor, but there were no stairs or escalators connecting the two. Doorways gaped like open wounds all around them, leading to differently shaped rooms that would all have housed a variety of shops if this place had been completed, adorned by empty signs over empty windows.  
She could hear the shuffling and chirping of wildlife, too. Massive crow nests sat safely above them, sheltered by walkways and hidden between the beams and pipes that were never fully installed, presumably sustained by the frightened rodents that fled before their flashlights.  
When she passed the oasis she found several small fountains arranged in a circle, their mosaic patterns covered in algae and their basins brimming with rainwater. In the water she saw skeletons, dead insects, a couple of coins and her own face.  
It looked better now. Her cheeks weren’t quite as hollow as they had been, her eyes didn’t seem to pop out of her skull any more, the pearl grey skin that stretched taught over her cheekbones looked softer because of frequent feedings. Her orange freckles looked golden against the silver of her flesh.  
When she bent down, lose strands of dark-brown curls fell over her bright hazel eyes. The shower she had “borrowed” from one of the empty skyline apartments had been stocked with expensive shampoo and conditioner, making her almost presentable.

“Hey,” the ventrue fledgling called after her, and she caught him flinching when she turned her eyes on him.  
“It’s… Uh, it’s down here. Marsh already went. Come on.”  
She followed him down a hallway that snaked into the walls, ending in another large hole. This one had a maintenance ladder installed. She figured it had to be an elevator shaft, but she couldn’t see an elevator below or above them.  
The fledgling climbed down and she went after. They descended into the pitch black underground, barely lighted by the flashlight he was carrying, until their feet hit hard concrete and the room before them was revealed.  
It was as massive as a car park. She saw no other ways in or out.  
The concrete floor only laid like a frame around them, sticking roughly two feet out from the walls and ending in dark, damp earth. A shovel was thrown into the nearest corner and she picked it up absentmindedly.  
“This is the place, malk,” the oldest ventrue called out to her. She nodded and walked across the soil.

There was death beneath her. This, she knew, was where all the mortal “undesirables” of the Camarilla ended up. Humans that saw things they shouldn’t, nosy police hoping to unravel the masquerade, ghouls who didn’t follow commands… Anything that decomposed instead of turning to ash ended up here, wrapped up in plastic, in a shallow and unmarked grave.  
She fell to her knees. Below her, packed tightly in the rich earth, there was faint smells. Human smells. She smelled gas, rot, pus and dust, the deceased reaching for her with their scented fingers like children to their mother. Her claws raked lines in the ground as she crawled, following her nose, hoping against hope for something familiar.  
“What is she doing…?” she could hear the youngest whisper behind her.  
“Dogs sniff,” the older murmured back.  
“Just shut up and stand still. Prince said this wouldn’t take all night. You got a light?”  
  
Bones and plastic. Some were deep, some were right beneath her hands, carrying faint memories of the people they once were. Perfume, makeup, booze and smoke wafted up to her keen nose from underground. When she caught his cologne she stopped dead in her tracks.  
It was an expensive brand. One of the many luxuries that came with working for the Camarilla. It smelled like his apartment, and despite being so faint it was barely noticeable it brought back a wave of memories.  
_Diamonds._  
She scuttled like a little bug across the dirt, losing and catching the smell, until she ended up in the very opposite corner of the massive cellar.  
_Rubies._  
His grave was the freshest, the earth holding him down loosely packed and light in colour, and when she straddled the spot and put her face down she knew he was there. Below her.  
_The world was made of gemstones._  
She stood up and put the shovel down. One of her companions shouted a fleeting protest, but was quickly stopped by the other, the words _“… said this might happen,”_ drifting to her across space.  
It took no time at all to uncover the large garbage bag they had stored him in. The smell of his cologne was stronger than ever, but so was the variety of smells that come with a corpse.  
Fluid. Infection. Consumption. Emeralds in the grass. She used her hands to brush off the rest, and pulled him carefully out of the ground, still covered by plastic.  
The sack was heavy, and if she didn’t want to sling it over her shoulder or drag it along in case she tore it. Luckily, her two guards had decided to join her.  
As if this had been the plan all along the oldest one grabbed her shovel and started covering up the hole, while the other (albeit nervously) helped her hoist the bag up and carry it carefully across the vast room. Getting it up the ladder was an ordeal.

They hid him in the trunk. None of them spoke on the way back, the fledgling ventrue clearly nervous and the older one focused intensely on driving. They dropped her off at her temporary haven and watched her take her prize inside.

She was giddy as a kid on Christmas, her claws itching to unwrap the present she had been wishing for all year, but it was getting late.  
She took him into the box with her. They slept together that night, cuddled among filthy pillows and blankets, safely hidden from the sunrise.


	20. Saint Mercury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for graphic descriptions of a corpse and necrophilic thoughts.

The next sundown found them embracing, like lovers.  
She liked that comparison. As the deadly rays of light melted across the warehouse and disappeared behind the cityscape of Los Angeles, she gently untangled her arms from the mushy plastic bag she had been cradling, and crawled out silently, as if she could wake it up if she wasn’t careful.  
They were alone in her haven. Beneath the dancing dust and filth of the abandoned building, a wonderful canvas of smells danced, having seeped from their plastic prison during the night and overflowed the little crate she had stuffed them both into.  
Sulphur. Putrid, rotten flesh, cologne and dank hair, the memories of lemonade and gold that had filled Mercurio’s head during his last moments on this wretched earth. There should have been anger and guilt, but there was only excitement in her stomach as she pulled him up from her nest and laid him gently on the concrete floor.  
They were reunited. He had, unknowingly and unwillingly, sparked her revolution when they met that night by the pier. He had died because of her orders, and she loved him for it.  
She loved him so much.

The smells got overpowering when she punctured the bag with a claw. It was a wet, physical smell that permeated the dead flesh inside her, sticking in her sinuses and flooding her brain, but she had to forgive him. It wasn’t his fault that mortal bodies decayed. It didn’t get better as she ripped a window for him and the fluids of his corpse seeped onto the floor around them. It was thin and transparent, like water.  
Water of the womb.  
She tore the plastic placenta open and let Saint Mercury be reborn in the darkness.

Blood and fat had oozed into the fibers of his clothing. His face was thin, his forehead peeled back to reveal white bone above two empty eye sockets, his lips were as white as the rest of him in stark contrast to the tufts of brown hair that clung to his shrivelled skull. Fat, bloated maggots wriggled in his throat, their brothers and sisters undoubtedly having made short process of his inner organs, but she couldn’t see that underneath his mouldy, wet clothes. His head, she saw, was separated from the rest of him.  
When she picked it up the skin on the back of his head drooped down, loose and full of water, and it seemed to float out beneath him as she set it down beside her.  
His empty eyes watched her as she stood up and brushed her knees off.  
  
She hadn’t been consciously aware of her plan until that night in the graveyard; it had just stewed and prepared in the back of her mind until it popped out, fully formed, as she watched her hands dig Mercurio out of the earth. Although his body might be slowly liquefying, he was so much more than just the sum of his rot.  
  
He was important. A martyr. His death was the gateway to her new life. After the consumption of Andrei, he had been her first follower (and victim), he had allowed her to discover her unique, corrupted strain of mind control and he had followed her orders until the end. Mercurio was a symbol for the things she could never achieve; the coagulation and insect eggs covering his mortal shell meant he was one with nature, in a way she could never, ever be.  
When the final death came for her she would disintegrate and blow away. No one could ever be sure she was dead. Her head could not be cut off and made a trophy, her broken bones and tangled hair would disappear, and she would never become part of the hunting grounds she used while alive.  
Mercurio was different.

He was so tangible. While she was a monster, he was human.  
Mercurio had been a man, he had lived a man’s life. He had fucked, eaten, worked, breathed the salty air around the apartment that he bought with money that he earned, worried about things like higher education and a future for his child, ran out of breath speeding through a life full of scabs and sweat. He was stunning in his mortal flaws.  
She supposed she had once been like him, but she didn’t remember.  
And this? The final journey of his vessel, ending in maggots and gas, hidden in a bag with countless others of his kind? It was the ultimate conclusion.  
Decomposition was so _mortal_. So intensely and absurdly beautiful, the sight made her emotional. The natural process of his fat and tissues breaking down needed to be framed, showcased, shoved into the face of the underworld so they could see what they were missing out on.

She loved him _so much_.

The cross she had made was a massive, heavy thing. It was fashioned by two great planks of wood she had found among other construction materials behind the building, and held together by a certified shitton of nails, beaten into it using a broken piece of concrete as an improvised hammer. It stood much taller than her when upright, but now it laid flat across the floor. Waiting.  
No matter how gentle she tried to be, he fell apart when she moved him. His skin slipped, his belly burst, hair, nails and chunks of flesh fell to the floor as she positioned him on the cross. She tried to stick them on again with a bit of duct tape. She knew he would fall right off if she just nailed him there, so in a moment of inspiration she decided to immortalize him the way ancient Egyptians had.  
In a modern twist of the mummification ritual she started wrapping the plank his arms were laying across in tape. Good thing she had bought a lot.  
His legs were next. Then his stomach and chest. He oozed between her fingers and leaked precious juices from beneath the layers, but he (mostly) stayed intact as she worked.

His head… She pulled it into her lap, paying no mind to the white little maggots that fell from it, and gazed into his empty eyes. She gently ran a finger over his clumps of hair, and felt the scalp move beneath it.  
He was still recognizable. His cheeks were gaunt, his skin was cold, his lips were shrunk back to reveal stained teeth, but he was still her fleet footed god. She hugged it into her stomach and felt the sludge of his death drip down her already stained-beyond-recognition shirt.  
She couldn’t. She had to keep at least that part of him. He would have wanted that, she was sure.

When his body was wrapped securely to the cross, she slowly and laboriously raised it on her back, hitching both arms beneath it to secure it in place.  
Now came the hard part.  
  
She managed to get the cross out of the building by hoisting it through the non-existent roof, showing impressive balance as she scaled the broken concrete ramps and pulled herself up by the feet over steel beams. She had never felt as exposed as she did then, lying flat on the top of the broken walls, the wind grabbing at her clothes and threatening to push her down.  
She had to lay the cross like a bridge over to the next building, and it almost fell into the alley below them when she hoisted it onto her back once more, but she was going.  
Slowly she crept from building to building, keeping as deep into the shadows as she could, sending a silent thanks to whatever god would listen every time she could duck into the safety of a nook, chimney or rooftop patio. The bustle of the street below was so loud it was grating.  
Soon, their journey came to a stop. She was crouching on an apartment complex, looking down at the blasphemous “Confession” club, beautiful glass-stained windows glowing eerily red in the night.  
There were a couple of smokers out front, but they hadn’t spotted her. Yet.

Lady Luck was smiling down on her tonight. She smokers left and no more came out, and she decided that it was now, or never.  
Light as a dancer she jumped down to the giant stone wall that surrounded the former church, balancing uncertainly on it for a second, before springing along it without making a sound, bent over so the bottom of Mercurio’s cross wouldn’t scrape behind them. She made it to the relative safety of the fenced in alley behind the club, from where she could skip onto the roof of the building itself.  
She got on her stomach and shimmied along the ancient, dirty shingles, sending rocks and clumps of moss rolling down the tilt, until she reached the highest point of the roof.  
Almost.  
She slipped the cross from her back and balanced it in front of her, just long enough to get the rope she slung across her shoulders. She tied each end around the planks that stuck out, feeling Mercurio’s arms squish inwards when she tightened it, and made a loop in the middle, over where his head should have been.  
Then she took a second to look at him.  
Most of the cross was wrapped in black tape, and the headless shape on it just barely looked human. It looked like a prop. Then again, that was perfect. It glistened with juice and smelled like death, but no one could probably smell that all the way up here, right?  
Right.  
She crawled uncertainly to the edge of the roof and looked down on the entrance just in time to see a single human enter the club. The courtyard was empty.  
  
She grabbed the loop, swung Mercurio on his cross over the roof, and slipped the rope around the sturdy, iron spike that stuck out in front of her, leaving him hanging securely just over the club entrance.

Then she got the fuck down.

She landed by the little side entrance by the trash cans, stained and reeking of death, and realized she had to look different if she wanted to properly view her work. Luckily the lady having a cigarette beneath her was more than happy to come down the local manhole and donate her clothes, blood and life.  
When she resurfaced barely five minutes later she was dressed in tight, black pantyhose, a sleek and unremarkable black dress and a leather jacket. All items of clothing were blessedly free of corpse stains.  
There were even a pack of smokes in her pocket, and she had one while walking slowly to the front of the building in her new heels, hopefully blending in with the mortals.

There he was.  
The other humans didn’t even look at him, that’s how well he blended in. Because of the darkness and height, he looked nondescript, pitch black, extremely fake and like he belonged there.  
But she knew.  
To her surprise she would feel the gentle prickle of tears beginning behind her eyelids, her heart soaring and the beast inside her purring as she stared up at her masterpiece.  
  
Mercury.  
The martyr.  
The saint.  
Equal to Christ in his beauty, a symbol of the holy communion between flesh and death, one in which she could never partake.  


_Then all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones, and lay away their robes, and put off their broidered garments: they shall clothe themselves with trembling; they shall sit upon the ground, and shall tremble at every moment, and be astonished at thee._  
  


She made her way home after that, the task having taken far too long. She had a mission from the prince, she knew, but it would have to wait another night. The last two hours until sunrise wouldn’t suffice.  
The stink of her haven brought tears to her eyes again, and this time she let them flow without worry. His cologne was overpowered by the permeating stench of his corpse, bits of which were still laying on the floor and in the plastic bag they had buried him in. His head laid quietly and stared at her.  
“Did you like that, Mercury?” she whispered to it as she passed to pick up the trash. She went outside, buried it in an open patch of hard soil, and forgot about it completely.  
She was about to go to bed when the thought of someone finding her treasure struck her. Despite having nothing to separate them, despite knowing for sure that his juices and stench would stain her nest, she couldn’t just let him lie there on the cold, grey floor.  
So she took him with her into the crate.  
To not ruin her new clothes, she shed them all.  
She nestled his decapitated head between her breasts after pulling the lid over them, breathing deep of his hair, cradling the broken stumps of spine that stuck out of his broken neck. His mouth pressed against her stomach, gentle as a kiss.  
She cried. She shook. Sobs of excitement and grief rocked her frame, and she pressed his skull further and further into her cold body, as if they could merge and become one.

That night, they were husband and wife, joined under the eyes of God.  
And they slept.


	21. Cal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a long one.

Cal was a police officer. That was not all he was, of course.

He was a husband, a father, a pretty decent cook, a hobbyist songwriter and amateur guitarist. He was also an objectively good man who always did what he could to help the people around him, although the two years since his transfer to the LAPD had been tough, and that good heart was starting to harden now.

This was a weird city, Cal knew. There were too many people crammed in here, crawling over each other like cockroaches over spoiled food, many of them struggling with various addictions to the things that flowed like water through these streets. If it wasn’t substance, then it was alcohol, and every single night Cal found himself called out to some bar that looked like all the other bars, restraining people that looked like all the other people, for all the same reasons.

Fighting and firearms. It seemed the people of Los Angeles were growing them in their back yards.

Tonight was a little different, however. On his way back to the station to end his shift for the evening, his radio had buzzed up to alert all available units that several gunshots had been heard downtown. This was nothing out of the ordinary, except for the building in question.

The Hollowbrook hotel. It had not been used as a hotel in quite a while, having shut down for a large-scale renovation roughly 18 months ago, but only five months into the project everything had come to a halt. Turns out the building firm hired by the hotel owner was driven mostly (if not entirely) by illegal immigrants, working illicitly under the radar, and once they were busted there were no one left to work. No other contractors dared take the job because of poor documentation of what had already been done.

So the owner had two choices: Hire a proper contractor for five times the price he had been paying so they could undo everything and redo it, or let the building rot until it’s value fell enough for someone to buy it, demolish it and repurpose the land.

He had chosen the second.

The place became a known “place for operations”, as they said. Everyone who needed a place out of sight could sneak into the Hollowbrook and conduct business. Or at least, that’s how it had been at first.  
The place went mysteriously quiet some time ago. Most likely explanation was that some criminal harder than the usual had claimed it for himself and scared away the smaller fish, but as far as Cal was concerned, they could have it. It made his job a lot easier.

That’s why it worried him so much that there was trouble again; If whoever had claimed the territory was losing their grasp, it meant a power shift downtown, and with it came a wave of crime that he really did not want to deal with.  
His partner, Michelle, brought his attention back to the car.  
“Funny, aint it?” she mused, and Cal realized he had not been listening to a single thing she said.  
Michelle Tyre was a short, broad woman, primarily known around the precinct for remembering everyone’s birthdays and bringing weird vegan cake for them, that was usually left in the break room and finished two days later to not hurt her feelings. She was also freakishly strong for a woman her size. If you wanted someone to tell jokes, buy you coffee and wrestle drunk bikers to the ground after one of them breaks your nose, you wanted Michelle.  
Cal cherished their patrols together, but she did have a tendency to ramble. Filtering out the important stuff was a skill he had yet to perfect.  
“Uh… Sorry?” he said.  
“Come on, get your head on straight! You didn’t see that guy outside LaCroix tower?”  
“What guy?”  
“The massive guy! Ponytail, trench coat, face like he got hit by a bus?”  
“No.”  
“Well, don’t matter now anyhow. We’re here.”

The former hotel looked like it had been abandoned for much longer than was true. Every single window was boarded up tightly, the grimy exterior was full of graffiti, and the heavy, solid doors were full of scratches from unsuccessful burglaries. Cal honestly didn’t know how people got in, seeing as how all the fire escapes were taken down.  
They got out of the car and walked up the filthy steps to the front door. Lo and behold, the doors were locked. Michelle nodded to him and got out her flashlight, and when he did the same, they started going around the building in opposite directions, looking for any signs of forced entry.

A couple of minutes later they were both on their way to the roof, using a rickety lift meant for building materials that, strictly speaking, should not still be in service.

Upon entering the building, they immediately called for backup.  
The room was wide and unfinished. Several walls were just wooden frames, some filled with rotting insulation, others covered with plastic. There was a barrel fire in the middle, cardboard, blankets and even a couple boxes of bullets on the floor, but none of that was the source of their horror.  
It was the _blood_.  
Among the broken bottles, magazines and wooden material, bodies lay face-down and bleeding. Some were clearly victims of a shootout, their pale and frightened faces disfigured by bullet holes, while most of them looked like an animal had torn them apart. One unlucky man in a grey hoodie and sweatpants was nailed to the wall by a massive fireaxe.  
The smell of faeces and gunpowder was overpowering.  
“Jesus Christ…” Michelle whispered. Her voice was barely audible over the crackling of the fire.  
Cal didn’t know what to answer.  
“What… Who could have done this? Oh shit, Cal, look at this one.”  
He slowly approached her, nerves so tense they were ready to snap, head swirling around to check every shadow for enemies.  
The man she was looking at could have been no more than 19. His face was stretched by pain and fear, his eyes were wide and pale, and the reason Cal could see all of that despite the man lying on his stomach was because his head was just barely attached to his body. When Cal turned him over with the tip of his boot, his organs spilled out of his mangled corpse and gushed over the ground.  
They were told that backup was on it’s way, but the shootout seemed so recent that they were ordered to proceed cautiously, in case the murderer (or murderers) were still on scene. As far as they could tell they had taken the only exit.

Michelle went first, her gun kept steady over her flashlight, barely shaking at all. He followed closely and watched her back.

The next room looked like the first, but there were a lot less bodies. Another barrel fire, more hollow and unfinished architecture, the same broken bottles and filthy magazines.  
The sound of soft moans caused them both to cock their guns.  
At the far end of the room, struggling to support himself against a solid wall, stood a man. He looked a lot like the others with his anonymous clothes and frightened eyes, the difference being that he was clearly alive despite the gushing wound in his midsection.  
When he turned his eyes on them, Cal shivered.  
This man was dead. They both knew. His massive, brown eyes were like lamps in the dimly lit room, brimming with pained tears and fear, and when he parted his lips and attempted to speak, it all became too much for him and he crashed to the ground.  
Michelle, abandoning her better judgement, rushed to his side to catch him. Cal followed a little slower.  
  
The man was guzzling blood. Two skinny hands, like freckled spiders, desperately grabbed at Michelle’s sleeves when she tried to lay him in a stable position.  
“Shh, shh, it’s okay, we’re the police…” she mumbled. Cal remembered the first aid kit in his car.  
“Calm down. We’ll get you help. Stay with me.”  
The man grunted and heaved for breath, utilizing is last strength to pull Michelle as close to him as possible.  
“N-no, don’t…” he gurgled:  
“Don’t speak. It’s okay-“ Michelle tried, but he interrupted her.  
“Listen, listen, please, n-no time, she…”  
He coughed.  
“She’s… She’s here.”  
“Who is here?” Cal demanded, ignoring the startled look from his partner.  
“Who did this?”  
“T-the dog…” the man continued. Cal could see the life slipping from his face, but his eyes remained determined.  
“The g-guard dog, they call her. Shit… I didn’t w-want…”  
His frantic hands slowed down, his breathing hitched, his eyelids fluttered.  
“Guns… N-nothing, nothing works. She j-just… Rips. T-tears you, in m-my… My head. In my head. Oh god.”

Then he was gone.

They continued in silence after that. The next rooms ranged from giant to closet-like in size, always with that same, dishevelled, unfinished look. As they ventured deeper through the hotel they discovered clear signs of extended habitation, more blood, and (for some reason) a lot of ashes spread around. There were no more survivors.  
They had just cleared a room that seemed to have been used as a kitchen when a deafening noise ripped the air around them. Acting on instinct, they both scrambled to find cover.  
Cal ducked behind a massive, industrial-style stove and put his gun up, heart racing.  
A shot. There was not a doubt in his mind. Yet, when the fear unclouded his brain, he realized that the shot had not been fired near them; it seemed to come from somewhere beneath them:  
He turned his head and looked at Michelle, who had taken cover in the corner, and they nodded in agreement.  
Slowly, Cal put his head out.  
There was no one there.  
He crept out of hiding, keeping to the wall with his gun at the ready, so tense he could hear his blood roaring in his ears. The door ahead of him was blocked by a massive support beam, but it had punched a hole in the floor, and when he crawled over there he had an unobstructed view of the story below.  
At first, there was nothing. He was just about to signal to Michelle that he was moving down when a dark, hooded figure stumbled into view below him.  
It was a woman, dressed like all the other people in this place, and she was clutching her chest. She fell directly below him and tried to crawl backwards, facing someone Cal couldn’t see.

“Please!” she yelled.  
Cal saw the gun first, held steady by a gloved hand. Then the arm. The rest of the man was obscured by Cal’s top-down view, but he could see blonde hair, smartly slicked back, and a long coat.  
“Please, please, I’m not Sabbat, I won’t tell-“  
The man shot her in the head.

Cal heard voices then, low and urgent, and it was hard to make out with the gunshot still ringing in his ears.  
“… Empty,” a gruff voice said.  
“Down… His... Wouldn’t that be… Hm?” Another answered, too far away for Cal to hear properly.  
He was surprised to hear a shrill laugh, and even more surprised to see the man below him turn sharply on his heel and start running.  
“She found something!” he yelled. The sound of footsteps echoed for a second, then the slamming of a door, then silence.

He waited until he was sure they wouldn’t come back, and waved at Michelle, who had been sitting wide-eyed behind cover this entire time. She crept towards him and looked down.  
  
“What happened? There was another shot,” she hissed between her teeth.  
“Yeah,” Cal confirmed.  
“There were people below us. A blonde man shot a woman. She looked like she was one of the people living here, like the bodies we already found, but he was… Not.”  
“Just one?”  
“No, more. I heard two voices that wasn’t his, and at least four pairs of footsteps, it was hard to tell. There was this… Noise,” he hesitated to say laughter, “And that apparently got them going. They all ran in the same direction. The guy below me, the one who shot that woman, said “she found something” whatever that means.”  
“… What? The dead woman found something?”  
“No, they were talking about someone else. I think.”  
“Did you see a dog?”  
Cal looked at her like she was out of her mind, and was met with a confused frown.  
“What? Dog?”  
“That guy… The one who was a-alive, said something about a dog.”

Cal wiggled himself through the hole first, cursing his belly until he finally got through and landed heavily on the floor. He braved a look at the dead woman before fixing his eyes on the open door before him.  
Michelle landed next to him. She, too, looked at the woman.  
“Good god.”  
“Yeah.”  
“She’s so _young._ ”  
“… Yeah.”

They continued.  
The hotel was getting in progressively worse shape as they kept moving. Doors were unhinged, the floor was littered with shards of glass, the plastic covering on the unfinished walls was torn up and tattered, letting them see straight through the entire floor. There was holes, fire and trashed furniture everywhere, casting a flickering, red glow over the broken framework around them. They ducked behind cover where ever they found it, because soon they heard the constant footsteps of the people they were pursuing.  
They let them get far ahead before creeping after them. It there was five people with guns, like Cal suspected, they had no chance of handling them on their own.  
  
“Backup has to be here by now,” he murmured to Michelle as they crouched behind some debris.  
“You wanna wait for it?” she whispered back. He could see the hope in her eyes.  
“… No. We need to make sure there’s no other exits. If these fuckers get away…”  
He let the sentence hang there.

The next doorway lead them into suffocating darkness.  
This room was a small box, the framework walls covered in thick blankets to block out any light, which made the beams of their flashlights cut into the air. Cal took one step and felt something soft wiggle beneath his shoes.  
When he looked down he saw the frightened face of a man.  
“Michelle…” Cal whispered, bending down over the body. To his great surprise he saw the man’s eyes follow him.  
“This one’s alive.”  
She pointed her flashlight at the floor. Cal gagged.  
Someone’s tried to rip this man in half. A gruesome opening was riding up his midsection, his intestines hanging out like fat, white worms.

Two things happened in rapid succession.

A thunder of footsteps flew past the open doorstep they had entered through, and the man screamed.  
“Stay with him!” Michelle screamed. Before Cal could stop her she was hauling herself out of the room, running swiftly after the footsteps, and with a sinking horror in his gut Cal heard them disappear.  
“J-Jesus…” the man whispered below him. Cal put a gentle hand on his shoulder.  
Calling him a man wasn’t accurate. This was only a boy, extremely young compared to the other bodies they had found, a brave attempt at stubble dotting his weak, shivering chin. He was drooling down his cheeks and bleeding profusely, and Cal seriously doubted he had any chance to live.  
“Don’t go.. I didn’t know… I-it would be like this.”  
Drawing a deep breath, Cal sat down next to the boy.

“How old are you?”  
“Fi… Fifteen. I mean, I was fifteen.”  
“You’re not dead yet.”  
“Y-yeah I am. They embraced me last week. I got… I got in.”  
The ramblings of a dying man. He had seen it before.  
“What is your name, boy?”  
“Peter. B-but they called me Hobbit. Boss said I wasn’t gonna get taller anyway, didn’t matter if they e-e-embraced me early. It’s…”  
His eyes glazed over for a second, his voice trailing as the gushing blood from his stomach slowed to a drip. Cal sighed.  
“Peter, can you tell me anything? Anything at all? Please, stay with me.”  
“I…” Peter mumbled, looking at something far away. His face was shiny with sweat.  
“S-Sabbat was strong here… Before. That’s what they said. I joined after. Needed… Wanted the money. Guns. Dope, also, but I’m- I duwanna… Uh… N-not i-hi-hi-hi-“  
His voice ended in a high-pitched stutter as tears broke out of Peter’s eyes, and to his horror Cal saw they were dark against his skin. Like blood.  
“-Hi-hinterested. Not… My deal. Small stuff. Food, mostly, let the big guys b-bite me if they wanted, doll they called it. Blood doll. I… Oh god…”  
He was weakening by the minute, and Cal didn’t understand a word he was saying. His professional urge to get information was fighting with his empathy.  
“Please, Peter, stay here. Who did this? Who hurt you?”  
“Dog.” Peter mumbled. He closed his eyes.  
“The dog. Camarilla dog. G-guard dog. She- Uh, h-h- Blew the Sabbat out the first time, but boss heard they got her, t-took her head off, so they came back. Kids, a lot of us, but boss said he needed people. He needed fighters. Did- dun- don’t matter where you’re from. Some were younger than me. Not… Not many lasted.”  
“Peter! Peter, please, talk to me. Help is on it’s way.”  
That was only half a lie. Cal cursed under his breath as he heard footsteps, slow and even, approaching from somewhere in the room behind him. He prayed that it was the reinforcements, or Michelle returning, but the aching feeling in his gut told him something else.

“She’s coming…” Peter whispered.  
“Don’t… Don’t let her get me… Please…”

A shadow fell over the two of them.  
When Cal turned and pointed his flashlight at the blocked doorway, he didn’t see Michelle, or the police, but it wasn’t any of the armed men either.  
There, sharply silhouetted against the flickering light, was a woman.  
She was tall and thin as a stick, her long, skinny arms pressed against the doorframe like she was holding herself up. With the flashlight beam Cal could see she was wearing a pair of long, loose pants in some black fabric, completely unremarkable except for a colourful geometric pattern going down the side of her right leg and some kind of weapon buried to the hilt in her thigh. Her stomach looked concave over the black hem, bared underneath a very short top that could have been a sports bra. Over it she donned a black leather jacket rolled up to the elbows, and her unnaturally long, clawed fingers were protruding from fingerless leather gloves.  
Her face was as thin and bony as the rest of her. A copious amount of blood obscured her features somewhat, centred around her mouth. Her hair looked wet and fell in clumps over her wild, massive eyes, the only part of her with any real colour. They were hazel.

Cal stood and pointed his gun at her, but the second he did so he had a nagging suspicion that it wouldn’t help. She had a look he had seen a thousand times in the holding cells; so drugged out of her mind that her brain no longer processed danger and pain the way it should, making her essentially an organic robot.  
“Stay back,” he warned, his finger steady on the trigger.  
Peter whimpered beneath him.

The woman flashed him a bright-red smile.

“Police.”  
Her voice was not at all what Cal had expected. It was warm, smooth, as sweet and golden as honey, completely mismatching her clearly disturbed demeanour. She spoke with no fear, and when she slowly moved towards him, she didn’t seem to notice or care about the gun pointing directly at her head.  
“Frightened, my fly? Hm?”  
“I’m warning you, stay back!”  
“Ooh, I’m shaking. Come here little pig, I’ll huff, and puff, and blow-“

Cal took the shot.  
He missed.

She was on him like a tiger, claws flashing and teeth gnashing. She landed a punch straight into his forehead and he felt the crushing sensation of metal on bone before he went down.  
_Her gloves_. When she reached out and grabbed his gun from the floor, he saw the flash of gold at the end of her knuckles, undoubtedly spikes or plates to make her fists more lethal. _Goddamn_.  
Before he knew what was happening he was sitting on the floor, pressed against the wall, and the mouth of his own gun was digging into the underside of his jaw and partly restricting his air.  
  
The crazy woman was straddling his lap.  
“That’s not very nice…” She purred in his ear. Her free hand wandered down his front, patting beneath his jacket until she was satisfied that he had no more weapons.  
Her breath stank of death. Whatever was wetting her hair it certainly wasn’t water, and when she pressed her face into his neck he felt the slimy texture of it on his chin, making his empty stomach turn.  
“Oh, oh, tiny little ladybug… Had this place been less of a cornucopia tonight, I would have devoured you whole. Sad. So sad. You are my Romeo, but I am not your Juliette. Where you go I cannot follow.”  
She leaned back and let him breathe fresh air for a second, but the relief was temporary. Her free hand trailed down the side of her body, drawing bloody handprints on her exposed midriff, before settling by the weapon that was lodged deep in her thigh. She pulled it out with a grunt and watched the blood flow with a sort of disconnected interest.  
Then she plunged it into his belly.

What happened next was a blur. Pain, movement, his own screaming filling the room as the metal moved inside him. He heard her voice through the torture, amplified between his ears.  
  
“ _Good. Good. God, that’s good_.”  
  
He blacked out for a second, and when he came back he was on the floor next to Peter.  
Except he wasn’t. Where Peter had been, there was now a pile of ash. Had he gotten away?  
The question fled his mind when the woman sat down on his hips again, the gun pressing against his forehead, and licked her lips wildly.  
“No…” He said weakly. Her weight was putting pressure on the lower part of his stomach, and he could see his own guts bulging out of the wound she had given him. The sight was too much and he blacked out again.  
The blessed relief was only a couple of seconds long, and he returned to watch her press the knife over his eyes.  
The pain was white-hot. He saw stars, and then he saw nothing.  
But he could hear the blade scrape against his skull around his eye sockets.

“Don’t you like that, little pig?”  
“N-no…”

Something kept pulling him back to consciousness. She was moving on top of him, wriggling to position the gun at his jaw and the knife at her own tongue.

“What’s the matter?”  
“I… I wanna go home…”

His life was coming to him in flashes. Memories he thought he had forgotten.  
Oh god, what had they done to Michelle?

“Mmm… Yes. You wanna go home, piggy?”  
“Y-yes…”  
“You wanna go home to your beautiful house and fuck your beautiful wife?”

He felt teeth on his neck, but no breath. When she put her hand on his cheek to lightly thumb his lips, he noticed her skin was icy cold.  
She kissed him.  
If his tear canals hadn’t been torn apart by her knife, he could have cried.

“Are you good at pretending?”  
“P-please…”  
“I am. I’m very good.”  
  
This was it. His pulse was beating in his gums, his blood making his shirt and jacket soggy, and the life was quickly draining out of the holes in his skull.  
Not much longer.  
She put her lips against his ear and purred to him.

“ _I want you to go to your happy place…_ ”

 

Cal could hear screams, but they were distant. It felt like he was under water.  
He was sinking, sinking, but the water was warm and the pain was waning. Somewhere above him there were voices.

“Malk- Oh, god, what are you doing?”  
A man. Cal could envision blonde hair and gloves.  
“My job!” the woman replied.  
“Leave it. He’s dead. C’mon, cops are coming. We need to get out.”

Her weight lifted off him, and over the loud buzzing in his ears, he heard footsteps.

 

They would say Cal had been an objectively good man. A husband, a father, and a dedicated police officer. For weeks after he and his partner were found dead on scene there was a hush over the precinct, and on humid nights when one beer became five, his friends would talk about how he loved his job, and his guitar, and what a shame it was that the world had lost him.  
The manner of his gruesome death would not be uncovered. There was no talk around the LAPD about “Sabbat” or “embraces” or, god forbid, “vampires”.  
  
The Camarilla had done their job, and the prince was happy with his new dog.  
And so, life went on.  
Without Cal.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Malkavians, are indeed, batshit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10616532) by [Bearcina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bearcina/pseuds/Bearcina)




End file.
